A specification and construction paradigm for Organic Computing systems

Organic Computing systems are systems which have the capability to autonomously (re-)organize and adapt themselves. The benefit of such systems with self-x properties is that they are more dependable, as they can compensate for some failures. They are easier to maintain, because they can automatically configure themselves and are more convenient to use because of automatic adaptation to new situations. While Organic Computing systems have a lot of desired properties, there still exists only little knowledge on how they can be designed and built. In this paper an approach for specification and construction of a certain class of Organic Computing systems is presented, called the Restore Invariant Approach (RIA). The core idea is that the behaviour of an Organic Computing system can be split into productive phases and self-x phases where adaptation is necessary. This allows for a generic description of how ``organic'' aspects can be specified and implemented. The approach will be illustrated by applying it to a design methodology for Organic Computing systems and further refining it to an explicit case study in the domain of production automation.