Towards a Quantitative Notion of Self-organisation

Abstract

Organic Computing (OC) and other research initiatives like Autonomic Computing or Proactive Computing have developed the idea of systems that possess life-like properties, that self-organise, that adapt to their dynamically changing environments, and that establish other so-called self-x properties, like self-healing, self-configuration, self-optimisation etc. What we are searching for in OC are not concepts for systems that simply self-organise, but systems that self-organise to achieve a well defined system goal. Therefore we talk in OC about controlled self-organisation.Although the term self-organisation has been discussed for years, we miss a clear definition of self-organisation in most publications, which have a technically motivated background.In this paper, we summarise the state of the art and introduce a definition of self-organisation that addresses the problem of designing self-organising technical systems, which is the main objective of the OC initiative.

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