Organic computing - Emergence under control

Inhalt:

Organic Computing has emerged as a challenging vision for future information processing systems, based on the insight that already in the near future we will be surrounded by large collections of autonomous systems equipped with sensors and actuators to be aware of their environment, to communicate freely, and to organize themselves. The presence of networks of intelligent systems in our environment opens fascinating application areas but, at the same time, bears the problem of their controllability. Hence, we have to construct these systems - which we increasingly depend on - as robust, safe, flexible, and trustworthy as possible. In particular, a strong orientation of these systems towards human needs as opposed to a pure implementation of the technologically possible seems absolutely central. In order to achieve these goals, our technical systems will have to act more independently, flexibly, and autonomously, i.e. they will have to exhibit life-like properties. We call those systems “organic”. Hence, an “Organic Computing System” is a technical system, which adapts dynamically to the current conditions of its environment. It will be self-organizing, self-configuring, self-healing, self-protecting, self-explaining, and context-aware.

The vision of Organic Computing and its fundamental concepts arose independently in different research areas like Neuroscience, Molecular Biology, and Computer Engineering. Self-organizing systems have been studied by mathematicians, sociologists, physicists, economists, and computer scientists, but so far almost exclusively based on strongly simplified artificial models. Central aspects of Organic Computing systems have been and will be inspired by an analysis of information processing in biological systems. Nevertheless, the anticipated first generations of organic computing systems will still be based on well-known silicon technology. Their life-like properties will arise from opening up certain degrees of freedom in the functionality of technical application systems and by the transfer of organisational concepts observable in natural systems into their system architecture.

First steps towards adaptive and self-organizing computer systems are already being undertaken. Adaptivity, reconfigurability, emergence of new properties, and self-organisation are topics in a variety of research projects. The aims of OC have become strategic goals of prominent IT companies like IBM, Sun, Bosch, DaimlerChrysler, or Siemens-Fujitsu. The recently approved priority research program of the German Science Foundation (DFG) addresses fundamental challenges in the design of organic computing systems; its objective is a deeper understanding of emergent global behaviour in self-organising systems and the design of specific concepts and tools to support the construction of organic computing systems for technical applications.

For a technical exploitation, however, it must be understood that there exists a fundamental contradiction between classical top-down designs and freely emergent bottom-up systems: the problem of “controlled emergence”. The solution seems to lie in the middle: Dedicated observer/controller layers (or MAPE cycles) must take control of emergent subsystems without stifling their creativity.

The presentation will give a brief overview of the German research activities in the field of Organic Computing and introduce observer/controller architectures as a basic architectural template to solve the “controlled emergence” problem. Part of the fascination exerted by this new research field is due to the broad interpretability of the terms “emergence” and “self-organization”. The presentation will try to reduce the somewhat fuzzy meanings of these terms to a technically usable interpretation. Based on such a clarified terminology it will discuss an Organic Computing roadmap, which should help to classify different types of self-organizing systems.