Evolution as a Tool to Design Self-Organizing Systems

Self-organizing Systems exhibit numerous advantages such as robustness, adaptivity and scalability, and thus provide a solution for the increasing complexity we face within technical systems. While they are attractive solutions, due to their nature, designing self-organizing systems is not a straightforward task. Artificial evolution has been proposed as a possible way to build self-organizing systems, but there are still many open questions on how an engineer should apply this method for this purpose.

Evolutionary design process

We propose a system architecture for evolving self-organizing systems that marks the major cornerstones and decisions the designer has to face:

In particular, the following aspects need to be considered:

Simulation setup:

• Accuracy/granularity of the simulation?
• Physical capabilities of the agent + environment
• How many agents, homogeneous/heterogeneous configuration?

Interaction interface:

• How should the agent interact with the environment/other agents
• Number/type of sensors
• Ability to change the environment (enable stygmergy)

Evolvable decision unit

• Must be evolvable
• Smooth search space, not too large
• Genotype-to-phenotype mapping

Search algorithm

• There exists literally a zoo on metaheuristic optimization algorihtms (Cuckoo search, Honeybee, Frog leap, Firefly, ...)
• Ability to find global optimum
• Number of tweaking parameters?

Objective function

• Should contribute to a smooth search space
• Avoid modeling the solution instead of the problem
• Mapping of multiple objectives (or weighted sum?)

Framework for Evolutionary Design (FREVO)

• Is a way to implement an evolutionary design task for multi-agent system
• Needs a simulation of the problem
• Interface for sensor/actuator connections to the agents
• Feedback from a simulation run -> objective function
• Written in Java, runs on multiple platforms including Linux, Mac OS, Windows
• FREVO is available as open soure at http://frevo.sourceforge.net/
• FREVO introduction video including installation, setting up a simulation and running it (length 6 minutes)

Literature

• I. Fehérvári and W. Elmenreich. Evolution as a tool to design self-organizing systems. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems. Springer Verlag, May 2013.
• A. Sobe, I. Fehérvári, and W. Elmenreich. FREVO: A tool for evolving and evaluating self-organizing systems. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Evaluation for Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, Lyon, France, September 2012.