Observation and Control of Organic Systems

Organic Computing (OC) assumes that current trends and recent developments in computing, like growing interconnectedness and increasing computational power, pose new challenges to designers and users. In order to tackle the upcoming demands, OC has the vision to make systems more life-like (organic) by endowing them with abilities such as self-organisation, self-configuration, self-repair, or adaptation. Distributing computational intelligence by introducing concepts like self-organisation relieves the designer from exactly specifying the low-level system behaviour in all possible situations. In addition, the user has the possibility to define a few high-level goals, rather than having to manipulate many low-level parameters.

This article presents the generic Observer/Controller design pattern that serves as an architectural blueprint for self-organised OC systems. The major components of the Observer/Controller architecture and their responsibilities are introduced. Besides the general design, we discuss several distribution variants of the architecture. Furthermore, a survey presents research projects that use the Observer/Controller paradigm to solve technical problems from various domains.