Design and Construction of Organic Computing Systems

The next generation of embedded computing systems will have to meet new challenges. The systems are expected to act mainly autonomously, to dynamically adapt to changing environments and to interact with one another if necessary. Such systems are called organic. Organic Computing systems are similar to Autonomic Computing systems. They behave life-like and adapt to changes in their environment. In addition Organic Computing systems are often inspired by nature/biological phenomena. Design and construction of such systems brings new challenges for the software engineering process. In this paper we present a framework for design, construction and analysis of Organic Computing systems. It can facilitate design and construction as well as it can be used to (semi-)formally define organic properties like self-configuration or self-adaptation. We illustrate the framework on a real-world case study from production automation.