Self-Organisation in MAS - TFG AgentLink III

Scope

The scope of this TFG is to work on self-organisation in the complex distributed systems such as MAS. In order to have a broader view, the multi-agent systems studied must be different in terms of granularity, cardinality and heterogeneity of their agents. The point of focus of the proposed TFG will be on approaches to incorporate self-organisation mechanisms in the design of Multi-agent Systems. In particular, the efforts will concentrate on attempting to answer questions of major interest such as:

• How could self-organisation mechanisms already applied in other disciplines be reused in the design of MAS?
• How could we derive appropriate self-organisation mechanisms for MAS starting from a set of application requirements?
• Can a set of criteria suitable for characterisation of self-organisation and emergence in MAS be defined?
• Is it possible to define a number of benchmark applications that could be used for comparison of different self-organisation engineering approaches given the above criteria? Benchmarks are well-defined applications which can be used by researchers to show, to evaluate and to compare their techniques of self-organisation.
• How to strengthen the links with other disciplines such as biology, systemics, sociology and physics? Due to the diversity of the issues involved with self-organisation, participation of people from different disciplines such as biology, systemics, sociology, physics and software engineering will be strongly encouraged so that the problem of self-organisation will be highlighted from different perspectives.

Aims

The TFG will concern itself with five main aims:

• Grouping together the computing science research community working on self-organization and emergent behavior such as multi-agent systems, autonomic computing, pervasive computing
• Establishing and enhancing links with other disciplines through contacts with networks such as EXYSTENCE, or researcher community involved in the new EU NEST-PATHFINDER initiative (Tackling Complexity of Science).
• Providing a common definition of several notions with an interdisciplinary view such as: self-organization, emergence, complexity, adaptive systems, providing their commonalities and their differences, as well as the theories behind each of them.
• Defining at least one benchmark to enable researchers to compare their results.
• Proposing a set of necessary measures to evaluate a self-organizing mechanism.