Industrial Applications of Self-organizing Systems
From Self-Organization Wiki
Contents
Task description
- Discuss the need for self-organizing systems in industrial applications
- Give examples of success stories/potentials
- What is missing to "make things work"?
Results
Industrial View
- Collaboration has to improve the Business Case
- Return on investment
- Someone has to pay for it
- Add value
- Who is in control up to in the end?
Basis for collaboration
- Bring together industry and academia
- Two different languages
- Partnerships
- Early transfer to the industry
- NOTE: easier to justify than in the industry
- Present a benefit to the industry: way to make money
- New concepts difficult to accept; conservativeness
- Common set of working assumptions
- The power of a business plan
- Do not switch research agenda
What is missing?
- Research is there; sometimes too advanced
- Assurance of method properties is a necessary prerequisite for application of SOS methods in industrial products/settings
- Clear understanding on the application of self-organizing principles to the specific application
- internet-based applications: interaction between human self-organization and overlay network self-organization
- vehicular communications: micro-macro dependencies
- future wireless networks: self-organization of heterogeneous networks
- smart grid: self-organization up to a point, but needs to be able to react to severe oscillations
- Communication between industrial and academic needs to be improved
- Research Days
- Open questions:
- Who is control up to in the end?
- Timeliness and external constraints (regulation)
- Assurances that self-organising behaviour works
- Formal proofs, formal assurances, safety
- We cannot give this at the micro level, so provide macro-level behaviour assurances
- Need for Education - Training
- Change the way of thinking
- Eg. Stability may not be ensured, but the system works
- Provide the engineers with a black box that “works” at the macro-level
- Industry should give it a try
- Learning by doing (improve the way we show it works)
- Design Patterns (describing problems)
- To make things work, we need to start applications from scratch with self-org techniques to achieve the same functionality
- (eg. Traffic control, computers)
Success stories
- LTE?!
- Power distribution
- Internet-based industrial applications
- Vehicular networking
- Honey Bees derived algorithm.
- Used for aggregating robots with low computational power to find lightspot on the table
- Experiments and simulations
- The bio-inspired code is "superior" to traditional code as it allows adaptation (e.g. to obstacle, many light sources) without further modifications.
- Problem: not possible to guarantee that it will work
- Engineers do not like this
- Internet: not perfect but we accept this.
Self-Organisation may not apply everywhere
- The car is not complex but complicated, and we don't necessarily need self-organisation for the car
- There are applications where self-organisation does not apply
Where to use self-organisation?
- Lower-level parts are built traditionally following traditional engineering principles
- Higher-level system follows self-organisation principles
- Ex. Individual displays, computer, keyboard work, together they follow a self-org approach
- Car traffic control
- For systems where we can accept impreciseness (eg. Wikipedia), we gain more – acceptance of uncertainty
- When there is uncertainty, unforeseen situations