Challenges in Engineering Self-Organizing Systems

• Design of emergence:
  • How to design local rules achieving the desired global properties?
  • Non-trivial but approaches exist.

• Design of the communication / interaction protocol:
  • Degrees of freedom and adaptability

• Simple versus chaotic behavior: Can we describe the system state?
  • The state of some self-organizing systems can be easily modeled (firefly sync)
  • The state of other self-organizing systems cannot be modeled, they exhibit chaotic behavior, which makes it impossible to predict future states.

• Robustness issues
  • Malicious nodes, faults, defects

• Testing:
  • It can be very difficult to test a proposed self-organizing system with respect to a given goal (many entities, large operational range, chaotic behavior)
  • Rare events may lead to major global effects.
  • Repeatability of results

• User aspects
  • To what extend can today’s systems be replaced or complemented by self-organizing systems, taking into account
    • constraints and acceptance of the technology and
    • risks for users?

Documents from group work

• Group 2