Advances in Applied Self-Organizing Systems, 2nd Edition

Advances in Applied Self-Organizing Systems (Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing)

How do we design a self-organizing system? Is it possible to validate and control non-deterministic dynamics? What is the right balance between the emergent patterns that bring robustness, adaptability and scalability, and the traditional need for verification and validation of the outcomes?

The last several decades have seen much progress from original ideas of “emergent functionality” and “design for emergence”, to sophisticated mathematical formalisms of “guided self-organization”. And yet the main challenge remains, attracting the best scientific and engineering expertise to this elusive problem.

This book presents state-of-the-practice of successfully engineered self-organizing systems, and examines ways to balance design and self-organization in the context of applications.

As demonstrated in this second edition of Advances in Applied Self-Organizing Systems, finding this balance helps to deal with practical challenges as diverse as navigation of microscopic robots within blood vessels, self-monitoring aerospace vehicles, collective and modular robotics adapted for autonomous reconnaissance and surveillance, self-managing grids and multiprocessor scheduling, data visualization and self-modifying digital and analog circuitry, intrusion detection in computer networks, reconstruction of hydro-physical fields, traffic management, immunocomputing and nature-inspired computation.

Many algorithms proposed and discussed in this volume are biologically inspired, and the reader will also gain an insight into cellular automata, genetic algorithms, artificial immune systems, snake-like locomotion, ant foraging, birds flocking, neuromorphic circuits, amongst others. Demonstrating the practical relevance and applicability of self-organization, Advances in Applied Self-Organizing Systems will be an invaluable tool for advanced students and researchers in a wide range of fields.

Table of Contents

Part I: Introduction
Chapter 1: Design Versus Self-Organization
Chapter 2: Foundations and Formalizations of Self-Organization

Part II: Distributed Management and Control
Chapter 3: Self-Organizing Traffic Lights: A Realistic Simulation
Chapter 4: Self-Organizing Sensing of Structures: Monitoring a Space Vehicle Thermal Protection System
Chapter 5: Decentralised Decision Making for Ad-hoc Multi-Agent Systems
Chapter 6: Learning Mutation Strategies for Evolution and Adaptation of a Simulated Snakebot
Chapter 7: Self-Organization as Phase Transition in Decentralized Groups of Robots: A Study Based on Boltzmann Entropy
Chapter 8: Distributed Control of Microscopic Robots in Biomedical Applications

Part III: Self-Organizing Computation
Chapter 9: Self-Organizing Computing Systems: Songline Processors
Chapter 10: Self-Organizing Nomadic Services in Grids
Chapter 11: Immune System Support for Scheduling
Chapter 12: Formal Immune Networks: Self-Organization and Real-World Applications
Chapter 13: A Model for Self-Organizing Data Visualization Using Decentralized Multi-Agent Systems
Chapter 14: Memristive Excitable Automata: Structural Dynamics, Phenomenology, Localizations and Conductive Pathways

Part IV: Discussion
Chapter 15: A Turing Test for Emergence