organic computing - quo vadis
Organic Computing has emerged almost 10 years ago as a challenging vision for future information processing systems, based on the insight that already in the near future we will be surrounded by large collections of autonomous systems equipped with sensors and actuators to be aware of their environment, to communicate freely, and to organize themselves. The presence of networks of intelligent systems in our environment opens fascinating application areas but, at the same time, bears the problem of their controllability. Hence, we have to construct these systems - which we increasingly depend on - as robust, safe, flexible, and trustworthy as possible. In particular, a strong orientation of these systems towards human needs as opposed to a pure implementation of the technologically possible seems absolutely central. In order to achieve these goals, our technical systems will have to act more independently, flexibly, and autonomously, i.e. they will have to exhibit life-like properties. We call those systems "organic". Hence, an "Organic Computing System" is a technical system, which adapts dynamically to the current conditions of its environment. It will be self-organizing, self-configuring, self-healing, self-protecting, self-explaining, and context-aware. First steps towards adaptive and self-organizing computer systems are already being undertaken. Adaptivity, reconfigurability, emergence of new properties, and self-organization are topics in a variety of research projects. From 2005 until 2011 the German Science Foundation (DFG) has funded a priority research program on Organic Computing. It addresses fundamental challenges in the design of complex computing systems; its objective is a deeper understanding of emergent global behavior in self-organizing systems and the design of specific concepts and tools to support the construction of Organic Computing systems for technical applications. With the upcoming conclusion of the priority program in September 2011, we have to start the discussion about the future of OC: Organic Computing - Quo vadis?. This presentation will briefly recapitulate the research ideas of Organic Computing, explain key concepts, and illustrate these concepts with current technical application projects from the priority program. Before future directions can be discussed we will look at the lessons learnt so far. From this, we will derive important trends in OC, which can serve as guidelines for future research. These trends can be subsumed as (1) Design-time to run-time and (2) Social OC. Finally the talk will raise some mission-critical questions, which we will have to answer in due time if the vision of Organic Computing is to be fulfilled.
self-organization distributed systems computer system organization computers in other systems general system architecture computer system implementation