On Evolving Self-organizing Technical Systems

Moofushi Kandu fish (Image by Bruno
de Giusti under CC-BY-SA-2.5)

Individual swarm fish behave according to simple rules, which make the overall swarm an efficient entitiy for hunting and avoiding predators. Despite the simple local rules, a school of fish is a working, intelligent system. István Fehervari examined in his doctoral thesis how this behavior can be transferred to technical systems. The result is a tool making it easier to develop self-organizing systems.
Sometimes, it is possible to mimic natural self-organizing behavior for a technical system. At other times, you might not have access to such a template. "If there is no natural system, which we can copy, we have to develop it on our own," says István Fehérvári from the Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt. Fehérvári further explains: "This is very difficult because the behavior of a complex system is difficult to predict and the definition of the proper interaction behaviors is hard. Any change in the system creates an effect, often with unwanted consequences. This is why we apply an artificial evolution approach to evolve the local interaction rules,"

To make this approach feasible, the FREVO software has been developed, a tool that helps to apply the evolutionary approach in a unified way to different problem statements and settings. "FREVO provides a one-stop shop, with all the necessary steps for designing a self-organized algorithm for a given problem." says Fehérvári who devoted a major part of his thesis work to design and implement FREVO.  Now the tool is available to other researchers for further experiments and investigations. FREVO is an open-source program in Java that can be freely downloaded at frevo.sourceforge.net. 

Further readings and downloads:

• István Fehérvári, On Evolving Self-organizing Technical Systems, PhD Dissertation, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, 2013. (fulltext-pdf)
• 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.
• Download FREVO at frevo.sourceforge.net
• 6-minute video explaining installation, configuration and operation of FREVO