Towards Self-organization in Automotive Embedded Systems
ATC '09 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Autonomic and Trusted Computing
The variety engineering method: analyzing and designing information flows in organizations
Information Systems and e-Business Management
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For self-organising emergent solutions, there is no support to explicitly design system-wide information flows and feedback loops in those flows. This is problematic because the problem-solving power mainly resides in coordination between agents which needs information exchange. The flows of inherently decentralised information are essential for emergence. Feedback loops are a prerequisite for selforganisation. The design should explicitly focus on information flows. Otherwise, engineers are overwhelmed by details of decentralised coordinationmechanisms such as gradient fields without first looking at the bigger coordination picture. We introduce "Information Flow" as abstraction to design a solution independently of the coordination mechanism details by explicitly identifying information flows and designing feedback-loops. UML 2 activity diagrams are the notation. An automated guided vehicle transportation system shows the usefulness and feasibility.