Graeme Smith, Jeffrey W. Sanders. Formal Development of Self-organising 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 90-104, Springer, 2009. [doi]
Attempts to engineer autonomic multi-agent systems, particularly those having large numbers of agents, have revealed the need for design structures and formalisms to support the construction of properties that emerge at the system level. Such emergence, like self-∗ behaviour, relies typically on intricate inter-agent interactions. This paper shows how the top-down incremental approach of Formal Methods can be used satisfactorily in that situation, by considering a case study in which agents adapt and autonomously achieve a given configuration.