Constraining Self-organisation Through Corridors of Correct Behaviour: The Restore Invariant Approach

Self-organisation aspects and the large number of entities in Organic Computing (OC) systems make them extremely hard to predict and analyse. However, the application of OC principles to, e.g., safety critical systems, is usually not conceivable without behavioural guarantees. In this article, a rigorous approach called the Restore Invariant Approach is presented, which provides a specification paradigm and a formal framework that allows to give guarantees for a system despite of self-organisation. The approach provides a method for specifying unwanted system states by constraining the system and defining a corridor of correct behaviour. Furthermore, a decentralised algorithm for monitoring and restoring the invariant based on coalition formation is presented.