The term “emergence” is usually used to mean something surprising (and often unpleasant) in the behavior of a complex system, without further qualification. Designers of OC systems want to manage emergence in complex engineered systems so that it can contribute to, or even perhaps enable, accomplishing the system’s performance goals. That is, OC designers aim to construct systems that are more flexible and adaptable in complex environments, to gain some of the advantages in robustness and adaptability that biological systems seem to gain from these phenomena. In this chapter we suggest some principles that we believe underlie the enormous flexibility and opportunistic adaptability of biological systems. We show how these principles might map to systems engineering concepts when they do, and what to do instead when they don’t. We then describe five specific challenges for the engineering of OC systems, and how we think they might be addressed. We also discuss the key role played by language and representation in this view of designing and deploying an OC system. Finally, we describe our progress and prospects in addressing these challenges, and thus in implementing systems to demonstrate the capabilities that we have identified as essential for successful OC systems.
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Bellman, K.L., Landauer, C., Nelson, P.R. (2009). Systems Engineering for Organic Computing: The Challenge of Shared Design and Control between OC Systems and their Human Engineers. In: Organic Computing. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77657-4_3
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