Engineering Self-Organising Systems : Nature-Inspired Approaches to Software Engineering / edited by Giovanna Marzo Serugendo, Anthony Karageorgos, Omer F. Rana, Franco Zambonelli.

As information handling systems get more and more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage them using traditional approaches based on centralized and pre-defined control mechanisms. Over recent years, there has been a significant increase in taking inspiration from biology, the physical world, chemistry, and social systems to more efficiently manage such systems - generally based on the concept of self-organisation; this gave rise to self-organising applications. This book constitutes a reference and starting point for establishing the field of engineering self-organising applications. It comprises revised and extended papers presented at the Engineering Self-Organising Applications Workshop, ESOA 2003, held at AAMAS 2003 in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2003 and selected invited papers from leading researchers in self-organisation. The book is organized in parts on applications, natural metaphors (multi-cells and genetic algorithms, stigmergy, and atoms and evolution), artificial interaction mechanisms, middleware, and methods and tools.

Applications -- Self-Organisation: Paradigms and Applications -- Self-Organizing MANET Management -- Toward the Application of Self Organizing Systems to Agent Infrastructures -- A Critical Review and Prospects -- Natural Metaphors -- A Catalog of Biologically-Inspired Primitives for Engineering Self-Organization -- Nature-Inspired Self-Organisation in Wireless Communications Networks -- Designing Self-Assembly for 2-Dimensional Building Blocks -- Strategies for the Increased Robustness of Ant-Based Clustering -- Self-Organising in Multi-agent Coordination and Control Using Stigmergy -- Managing Computer Networks Security through Self-Organization: A Complex System Perspective -- A Holonic Self-Organization Approach to the Design of Emergent e-Logistics Infrastructures -- An Evolutionary Approach for Studying Heterogeneous Strategies in Electronic Markets -- Artificial Interaction Mechanisms -- Self-Organizing Agents for Mechanical Design -- Can Tags Build Working Systems? From MABS to ESOA -- Self-Organizing Referral Networks: A Process View of Trust and Authority -- Middleware -- Adaptiveness in Linda-Based Coordination Models -- Self-Organization in Multi Agent Systems: A Middleware Approach -- Methods and Tools -- Providing Effective Access to Shared Resources: A COIN Approach -- A Modular Paradigm for Building Self-Organizing Peer-to-Peer Applications -- Tools for Self-Organizing Applications Engineering.