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Self-organization is a multi-faceted phenomenon, present in many fields, operating at multiple scales, and performs diverse roles. This book focuses on the state of the practice of self-organizing systems. The case studies described illustrate the richness of the topic, and also provide guidance to the intricate areas.
The book begins with more established fields of traffic management, electricity trading markets, and structural health monitoring, building up towards robotic teams, solving challenging tasks and deployed in tough environments. The second half of the book follows with a deeper look into the micro-level, and considers interactions between agents. These interactions lead towards self-organizing diagnostics and visualization, reaction-diffusion computation, self-assembly of nano-structures, and eventually to artificial life.
Demonstrating the practical relevance and applicability of self-organization, this book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in a wide range of fields.
List of contents
Part I: Introduction.- Design versus Self-organization.- Foundations and Formalizations of Self-Organization.- Part II: Distributed Management and Control.- Self-organizing Traffic Lights: A Realistic Simulation.- A Self-organizing Sensing System for Structural Health Monitoring of Aerospace Vehicles.- Decentralized Decision Making for Multi-Agent Systems.- Learning Mutation Strategies for Evolution and Adaptation of a Simulated Snakebot.- Self-Organization as Phase Transition in Decentralized Groups of Robots.- Distributed Control of Microscopic Robots in Biomedical Applications.- Part III: Self-organizing Computation.- Self-Organizing Digital Systems.- Self-organizing Nomadic Services in Grids.- Immune System Support for Scheduling.- Formal Immune Networks.- A Model for Self-organizing Data Visualization Using Decentralized Multi-Agent Systems.- Emergence of Travelling Localizations in Mutualistic-Excitation Media.- Part IV: Discussion.- A Turing Test for Emergence.- Index.
