Methodological Guidelines for Engineering Self-organization and Emergence

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

Engineering Agent Frameworks: An Application in Multi-Robot Systems

International audienceIn this paper, we present a novel development process called SpEArAF (Species to Engineer Architectures for Agent Frameworks) and evaluate its relevance to ease the implementation of Multi-Agent Systems in the context of a multi-robot project for crisis management. SpEArAF allows to build component-based architectures for agents and their infrastructure. We show the advantages of using an architecture-based process to realise an application-specific agent framework adapted to the requirements of such a system. SpEArAF gives guidelines to enables the use of architecture-oriented practices for agent implementation