Biologically-Inspired Concepts for Self-Management of Complexity

Inherent complexity in large-scale applications may be impossible to eliminate or even ameliorate despite a number of promising advances. In such cases, the complexity must be tolerated and managed. Such management may be beyond the abilities of humans, or require such overhead as to make management by humans unrealistic. A number of initiatives inspired by concepts in biology have arisen for self-management of complex systems. We present some ideas and techniques we have been experimenting with, inspired by lesser-known concepts in biology that show promise in protecting complex systems and represent a step towards self-management of complexity

A Comparison of Self-Organization Mechanisms in Nature and Information Technology

Successful concepts of self-organization found in natural systems can enable enterprise information systems to address their complexity issues. In this paper, we propose an analysis of self-organization approaches found in natural sciences and information technology. Based on common classes both for application areas and mechanisms, these two fields are compared in order to identify successful concepts, which can be used for the adaptation in information systems research. For illustration purposes, we give a brief example for self-organization in the domain of Service-oriented Architectures, i.e., cooperation mechanisms for agents monitoring services