Tom Holvoet

Development of self-organising emergent applications with simulation-based numerical analysis

The goal of engineering self-organising emergent systems is to acquire a macroscopic system behaviour solely from autonomous local activity and interaction. Due to the non-deterministic nature of such systems, it is hard to guarantee that the required macroscopic behaviour is achieved and maintained. Before even considering a self-organising emergent system in an industrial context, e.g. for Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) transportation systems, such guarantees are needed. An empirical analysis approach is proposed that combines realistic agent-based simulations with existing scientific numerical algorithms for analysing the macroscopic behaviour. The numerical algorithm itself obtains the analysis results on the fly by steering and accelerating the simulation process according to the algorithms goal. The approach is feasible, compared to formal proofs, and leads to more reliable and valuable results, compared to mere observation of simulation results. Also, the approach allows to systematically analyse the macroscopic behaviour to acquire macroscopic guarantees and feedback that can be used by an engineering process to iteratively shape a self-organising emergent solution.

Quality Assurance for Self-Adaptive, Self-Organising Systems (Message from the Workshop Organisers)

Welcome to the first edition of the Workshop on Quality Assurance for Self-adaptive, Self-organising Systems (QA4SASO 2014). Developing self-adaptive, self-organising systems that fulfil the requirements of different stakeholders is no simple matter. Quality assurance is required at each phase of the entire development process, starting from requirements elicitation, agent design, system architecture design, and finally in the implementation, testing, and deployment of the system. The quality of the artefacts from each development phase affects the rest of the system, since all parts are closely related to each other. Furthermore, the shift of adaptation decisions from design-time to run-time - necessitated by the need of the systems to adapt to changing circumstances - makes it difficult, but even more essential, to assure high quality standards in these kind of systems. Accordingly, the analysis and evaluation of these self-systems has to take into account the specific operational context to achieve high quality standards. As a consequence, we like to address the following challenges in the workshop on quality assurance for self-adaptive, self-organising systems: Evolutionary developing system, interleaving mechanisms, uncertainty according the system environment, open system architecture, and large number of system participants. The necessity to investigate this field has already been recognised and addressed in different communities, but there exists so far no platform to bring all these communities together. Therefore, the workshop provides an open stage for discussions about the different aspects of quality assurance for self-adaptive, self-organising systems.