Guiding Designs of Self-Organizing Swarms: Interactive and Automated Approaches

Engineering design has traditionally been a top-down process in which a designer shapes, arranges and combines various components in a specific, precise, hierarchical manner, to create an artifact that will behave deterministically in an intended way (Minai et al. 2006; Pahl et al. 2007). However, this process does not apply to complex systems that show self-organization, adaptation and emergence. Complex systems consist of a massive amount of simpler components that are coupled locally and loosely, whose behaviors at macroscopic scales emerge partially stochastically in a bottom-up way. Such emergent properties of complex systems are often very robust and dynamically adaptive to the surrounding environment, indicating that complex systems bear great potential for engineering applications (Ottino 2004).