Florian Nafz, Frank Ortmeier, Hella Seebach, Jan-Philipp Steghöfer, Wolfgang Reif. A Universal Self-Organization Mechanism for Role-Based Organic Computing Systems. In Wolfgang Reif, Guojun Wang, Jadwiga Indulska, editors, Autonomic and Trusted Computing, 6th International Conference, ATC 2009, Brisbane, Australia, July 7-9, 2009, Proceedings. Volume 5586 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 17-31, Springer, 2009. [doi]
An Organic Computing system has the ability to autonomously (re-)organize and adapt itself. Such a system exhibits so called self-x properties (e.g. self-healing) and is therefore more dependable as e.g.\ some failures can be compensated. Furthermore, it is easier to maintain as it automatically configures itself and more convenient to use because of its automatic adaptation to new situations. On the other hand, design and construction of Organic Computing systems is a challenging task. The Organic Design Pattern (ODP) is a design guideline to aid engineers in this task. This paper describes a universal reconfiguration mechanism for role-based Organic Computing systems. If a system is modeled in accordance with the ODP guideline, reconfiguration can be implemented generically on the basis of an of-the-shelf constraint solver. The paper shows how Kodkod can be used for this and illustrates the approach on an example from production automation.