Moez Mnif, Urban Richter, Jurgen Branke, Hartmut Schmeck, Christian Müller-Schloer

Today’s technical systems are becoming increasingly complex. Future systems will consist of a multitude of complex soft- and hardware components, which interact with each other to satisfy global system functional requirements. This trend bears the risk of more and more breakdowns and other unexpected behaviour. Organic Computing (OC) has the vision of addressing the challenges of complex distributed systems by making them more life-like (organic), i. e. endowing them with abilities such as self-organisation, self-configuration, self-repair, or adaptation. This can only be achieved by giving the system elements adequate degrees of freedom. This may result in an emergent behaviour, which can be positive as well as negative. Therefore, we need an observer/ controller architecture, which allows for self-organisation but at the same time enables adequate reactions to control the - sometimes completely unexpected - emerging global behaviour. In this paper, we give an introduction to a generic observer/controller architecture, adapt this framework to a scenario of a self-organising robot swarm, and show how to control and prevent global, collective, unwanted behaviour based on observations of the local behaviour of the distributed agents.

Keywords: Organic Computing - emergence - observer/controller architecture - multi-agent systems

Architecture of Computing Systems – ARCS 2007, LNCS 4415, pages 209-223, 2007.
Paul Lukowicz, Lothar Thiele, Gerhard Tröster (eds.), Springer
20th International Conference, Zurich, Switzerland, 12-15 March 2007. Proceedings

@incollection{mnif-lncs4415,
	Author = {Mnif, Moez and Richter, Urban and Branke, Jurgen and Schmeck, Hartmut and M{\"u}ller-Schloer, Christian},
	Booktitle = {Architecture of Computing Systems ---- ARCS 2007},
	Doi = {10.1007/978-3-540-71270-1_16},
	Editor = {Lukowicz, Paul and Thiele, Lothar and Tr{\"o}ster, Gerhard},
	Isbn = {978-3-540-71267-1},
	Note = {20th International Conference, Zurich, Switzerland, 12-15~} # mar # {~2007. Proceedings},
	Pages = {209--223},
	Publisher = {Springer},
	Series = {LNCS},
	Title = {Measurement and Control of Self-organised Behaviour in Robot Swarms},
	Url = {http://www.springerlink.com/content/n4035134561jk037/},
	Volume = 4415,
	Year = 2007}