Engineering Self-Organizing Systems Report for the 2 nd Year of PhD Course Engineering Self-Organizing Systems -Luca Gardelli 2 aliCE People… • Professors • Researchers Engineering Self-Organizing Systems -Luca Gardelli 4 Background and Motivations

Abstract

Abstract The increasing complexity of artificial systems is a great challenge for the modern engineer. Specifically, aspects like pervasiveness, heterogeneity and distribution are in contrast with the necessity of a greater reliability. The theory of self-organization deals with natural systems, tipically made of several entities locally interacting with each other in order to preserve or increase the system organization upon environment perturbations. After introducing self-organization principles and current developments in the multi-agent systems (MAS) research community, it follows a discussion about our activities in that frame. Specifically, here we concentrate on methodological and architectural aspects: despite the inherent robustness of self-organizing systems, their design creates several problems, in particular predictability and reliability. Then, we analyse these problems exploiting formal modelling and stochastic simulation tools