Designing Self-Organising Emergent Systems based on Information Flows and Feedback-loops

For self-organising emergent solutions, there is no support to explicitly design system-wide information flows and feedback loops in those flows. This is problematic because the problem-solving power mainly resides in coordination between agents which needs information exchange. The flows of inherently decentralised information are essential for emergence. Feedback loops are a prerequisite for selforganisation. The design should explicitly focus on information flows. Otherwise, engineers are overwhelmed by details of decentralised coordination mechanisms such as gradient fields without first looking at the bigger coordination We introduce “Information Flow” as abstraction to design a solution independently of the coordination mechanism details by explicitly identifying information flows and designing feedback-loops. UML 2 activity diagrams are the notation. An automated guided vehicle transportation system shows the usefulness and feasibility.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SASO
• Authors: Tom De Wolf, Tom Holvoet
• Keywords: Coordination Mechanism, Feedback Loops, Information flows, SASO 2007, Self-Organizing Systems