Methodological Guidelines for Engineering Self-organization and Emergence

Abstract

The ASCENS project deals with the design and development of complex self-adaptive systems, where self-organization is one of the possible means by which to achieve self-adaptation. However, to support the development of self-organising systems, one has to extensively re-situate their engineering from a software architectures and requirements point of view. In particular, in this chapter, we highlight the importance of the decomposition in components to go from the problem to the engineered solution. This leads us to explain and rationalise the following architectural strategy: designing by following the problem organisation. We discuss architectural advantages for development and documentation, and its coherence with existing methodological approaches to self-organisation, and we illustrate the approach with an example on the area of swarm robotics

Towards adaptive multi-robot systems: self-organization and self-adaptation

“…These can be problematic in cases where errors would affect the operability of a system. In Noël and Zambonelli (2015) the authors propose an abstract approach based on component decomposition for engineering application-specific self-organizing systems. The authors argument that the identification of elements and the assignment to roles builds a design bridge between the problem and the emergent behaviour, because the selected decomposition limits possible macro-level behaviours that can be executed during runtime.…”

“…Nevertheless, the term self-organization is also used as the process that leads to the state of emergence (Goldstein, 1999; Noël & Zambonelli, 2015).…”

“…As a consequence, the systems requirements are incompletely expressed (Bonjean et al , 2014), which in turn creates a demand for systems, especially in the field of multi-robot applications, that put emphasis on robustness and adaptivity rather than on behaving in an optimal fashion. Being able to adapt during runtime to uncertainty with unforeseen changes in the environment, altered requirements or malicious system components themselves allows dealing with this inevitable underspecification (Noël & Zambonelli, 2015). Furthermore, it is possible that such large system ensembles are exhibiting unforeseen, complex behaviour that cannot be observed in single system entities.…”