| On 2012-02-09 at 14:00:00 (Brussels Time) |
Abstract
Today’s technical systems contain more and more components which are typically networked and interacting with each other. So, these systems become very complex, which makes it difficult to engineer and maintain the system using traditional, hierarchical approaches. Looking into complex systems in nature, we see that they are controlled by distributed self-organizing mechanisms that are simple, scalable, robust, and adaptive. However, putting a self-organizing approach into technical systems is not straightforward, because such complex systems are typically hard to predict. A particular change in an interaction mechanism might even have counter-intuitive effects. In nature, the driving mechanism behind building self-organizing behavior is evolution - why not use the very same method in form of an evolutionary algorithm?
Keywords
self-organization, evolutionary computing, complex systems
