Organization, Self-Organization, Autonomy and Emergence: Status and Challenges

Development of IT-systems in application domains is facing an ever-growing complexity resulting from a continuous increase in dynamics of processes, applicationsand run-time environments and scaling. The impact of this trend is amplified by the lack of central control structures. As a consequence, controlling this complexity and dynamics is one of the most challenging requirements of today’s system engineers. The lack of a central control instance immediately raises the need for software systems which can react autonomously to changing environmental requirements and conditions. Therefore, a new paradigm is necessary how to build software systems changing radically the way one is used to think about systems and its development: self-organization, autonomy and emergence are the concepts that have to be build into future systems. This paper shows first steps in order to arrive at a theory of self-organization, autonomy and emergence and provides some of the fundamental principles that should be followed for the design of truly adaptive software systems.