How to Design and Implement Self-organising Resource-Flow Systems

The construction of self-organising systems often leads to very ingenious and specific solutions to a concrete problem. These solutions cannot be easily transferred to other domains or systems. As the development of self-organising systems is a very time consuming and challenging task, instructions, methodologies, and tools to design and construct such systems in a generic and reproducible manner are required. This article presents a software engineering guideline along with a pattern for the class of resource-flow systems and details the steps that are required to implement systems designed according to the pattern. The guideline enables a software engineer to easily and reproducibly construct self-organising resource-flow systems. In addition, the presented concepts and techniques, i.e. the precise definition of the system structure and of behavioural corridors, observation of the corridors at runtime, and the verification of the system components’ behaviour allow the engineer to guarantee correct system behaviour despite self-organisation.