Modeling of Self-Organizing Systems: An Overview

This paper gives a systematic overview on modeling formalisms suitable for modeling self-organizing systems. We distinguish between micro-level modeling and macro-level modeling. On the micro level, the behavior of each entity and the interaction between different object must be described by the model. Macrolevel modeling abstracts from the individual entities and only looks at the behavior of the system variables of interest. The differentiations between discrete and continuous time and between discrete and continuous state space lead to different descriptions of the model

On modeling of self-organizing systems

A goal of computing and networking systems is to limit ad-ministrative requirements for users and operators. A tech-nical systems should be able to configure itself as much as possible to increase the usability. This leads to the design of self-organizing systems. Self-organizing systems emerge as an increasingly important area of research, not only for computer networks but also in many other fields. For ana-lyzing properties of complex systems, a mathematical model for these systems may be useful. Whether a model with dis-crete time or with continuous time fits better, depends on the properties of the system and which analysis should be done in the model. In this paper we give a comparison be-tween discrete and continuous models and we give a formal definition for modeling continuous complex systems. Then this theory is applied to model slot-synchronization in wire-less networks