Self-Organizing Systems

Chair: Salima Hassas and Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo

Program Committee Members

In the recent years, self-organization has emerged as a promising facet in a paradigm shift for developing adaptable large-scale distributed systems and services. A lot of work has been achieved in order to endow computing systems evolving in highly dynamic operating environments with self-organizing capabilities. The major part of the achieved work is based on ad hoc mechanisms, generally inspired by natural biological or social systems. To date, there is no systematic technique for developing or verifying these systems. For self-organizing systems or services to be widely accepted by industry and the public, we must go beyond ad hoc implementations and build trusworthy self-org systems, i.e., they need to be dependable and controllable.

Dependability encompasses availability, reliability, safety, integrity, and maintainability of systems and services. Control in a self-organizing system is distributed and decentralized among the system components. However, it is crucial for system administrators to have the possibility to stop, reset, or guide the system.

The track on Self-Organizing Systems aims at setting foundations for the systematic engineering of trustworthy self-organizing computing systems. This track welcomes papers, in all areas of research and applications, particularly discussing dependability and controllability of self-organizing systems, their analysis techniques, formalization, development methods, and proofs of self-* properties, that bring a new insight into the understanding of self-organizing systems' behavior.

Topics include, but are not limited to:
  • Theories, frameworks, and methods for self-organizing systems.
  • Management and control of self-organizing systems.
  • Approaches to engineering self-organizing systems.
  • Applications and experiences with self-organizing systems.
  • Metrics for assessing self-organizing properties.
  • Simulations, tools, and testbeds for self-organization.
  • Debugging, testing, and evaluation of self-organizing systems.
  • Analysis tools for self-organization in complex distributed systems.
  • Self-organization and emergent properties in complex distributed systems.
  • Stabilization in self-organizing systems.
  • Dependability in self-organizing systems.
  • Formalization and proofs of dependability properties of self-org systems.
Domains of interests for self-organizing systems:
  • Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications.
  • Mobile robots.
  • Sensor networks.
  • Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs).
  • Grids.
  • Embedded systems.
  • Ubiquitous computing.
  • Autonomic computing and communications.
  • Computer networks, telecom networks.
  • Multi-agent systems.
  • E-business systems and services.
  • Complex adaptive systems.