Industrial Applications of Self-organizing Systems

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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