Towards a Methodology for Engineering Self-Organising Emergent Systems
Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Self-Organization and Autonomic Informatics (I)
Adaptivity and self-organization in organic computing systems
ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)
Exploiting a virtual environment in a real-world application
E4MAS'05 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Environments for Multi-Agent Systems
Development of self-organising emergent applications with simulation-based numerical analysis
ESOA'05 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Engineering Self-Organising Systems
A feedback-based decentralised coordination model for distributed open real-time systems
Journal of Systems and Software
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When designing decentralised autonomic computing systems, a fundamental engineering issue is to assess systemwide behaviour. Such decentralised systems are characterised by the lack of global control, typically consist of autonomous cooperating entities, and often rely on self-organised emergent behaviour to achieve the requirements. A well-founded and practically feasible approach to study overall system behaviour is a prerequisite for successful deployment. On one hand, formal proofs of correct behaviour and even predictions of the exact systemwide behaviour are practically infeasible due to the complex, dynamic, and often non-deterministic nature of selforganising emergent systems. On the other hand, simple simulations give no convincing arguments for guaranteeing system-wide properties. We describe an alternative approach that allows to analyse and assess trends in systemwide behaviour, based on so-called "equation-free" macroscopic analysis. This technique yields more reliable results about the system-wide behaviour, compared to mere observation of simulation results, at an affordable computational cost. Numerical algorithms act at the system-wide level and steer the simulations. This allows to limit the amount of simulations considerably. We illustrate the approach by studying a particular system-wide property of a decentralised control system for Automated Guided Vehicles and we outline a road map towards a general methodology for studying decentralised autonomic computing systems.