From Self-Organizing Mechanisms to Design Patterns to Engineering Self-Organizing Applications

This tutorial will first review the main bio-inspired self-organizing mechanisms available from the literature, such as gradient, gossip, or digital pheromone, explaining the links and relationships between them. The talk will then present these mechanisms under the form of design patterns, detailing what problem they address and what solution they provide. The second part of this tutorial focuses on showing how an application can be designed and engineered taking into account these design patterns. We will present three different execution models: rule-based systems, fraglets and BIO-CORE and discuss how they accommodate the design patterns discuss in the first part. In particular we will expand on BIO-CORE, an execution model that provides basic bio-inspired mechanisms as built-in services and allows the system to execute several composed or top-level bio-inspired mechanism at the same time, all sharing the basic mechanisms implemented inside the core. Finally, we will present open challenges in the area of engineering self-organizing systems, regarding the use of basic design patterns as operators ready-to-use that applications and services can rely on.