Lakeside Research Days'09

Prologue

This meeting has been held on Friday, 19th of June 2009, 9AM - 1PM. The overall aim of this meeting was to collect ideas/problems which should be tackled during the Lakeside Labs Research Days09. Hence, groups have been formed and asked to work on the following tasks:

• Name 3+ research areas of different research groups which are related to Self-organization and robustness (and explain why).
• Look at the expertise of invited researchers and your results from the above question and propose 3+ research questions that could be tackled at the research days.
• Try to rank both lists.

Group1

Members of this group are Christian Hofbauer (NES/ES), Alex Onic (NES/ES), Markus Reichhartinger (SST/CM) and Evsen Yanmaz (NES/MS).

During the discussion process with respect to the first task, a lot of problems occured due to the loose and unclear definition of the term self-organization. Since this term is already not well-defined, the problems increase when additionally considering robustness in the context of self-organization. The research area of control theory seems to us as a classical field where the definitions cannot be brought inline with the theory in this field. For instance, robustness of course requires to adapt to certain disturbances. In order to notice these disturbances, there has to be a kind of feedback loop which allows for reacting on unintended changes in the output. These reactions on unintended changes are carried out by a so-called controller. However, this controller can be seen as a centralized unit handling all disturbances. It is thus not clear, if such an approach can be still regarded as a self-organizing system. More in detail, it will either depend on the point of view, from which someone is looking at the system, or on the definition used to characterize a self-organizing system Definition_of_Self-Organizing_Systems. For instance, if

Due to the problems with respect to definitions, the main work focused on the second task, namely finding research questions.

• Adaptation vs self-organization
  • Is an adaptive system necessarily self-organizing?
  • Is adaptation necessary and sufficient?
  • Is a self-organizing system necessarily adaptive?
  • Can a non-networked system be self-organized?
  • When is a system a network (Do all elements have the same)?

• Robustness
  • Is there a common definition (which is valid for all research areas)?
  • Should there be a definition of robustness?