2010-09-01
Designing comprehensible self-organising systems
Publication
Publication
Self-organising systems are a popular engineering concept for designing decentralised autonomic computing systems. They are able to find solutions in complex and versatile problem domains, but as they capture more complexity in their own design, they are becoming less and less comprehensible to their users (be they humans or intelligent agents). We describe a design challenge that relates to usability theory in general and in particular resembles an observation made by Phoebe Senger, who noted that software agents tend to become incomprehensible in their behaviour as they grow more complex. In the manifestation of self-organising systems, the problem is more urgent (since we find ourselves using them more and more) and harder to solve at the same time (since these systems are not centrally controlled). We describe the problem domain and propose three system properties that could be used as quality indicators in this regard: Stability, Learnability and Engageability. We demonstrate their usage in a simple model of dynamic pricing markets (e.g. the electricity domain) and evaluate them in different ways.
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| IEEE Computer Society | |
| doi.org/10.1109/SASO.2010.18 | |
| Intelligent en Decentraal management van netwerken en data , Intelligent en Decentraal management van netwerken en data | |
| Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems | |
| Organisation | Intelligent and autonomous systems |
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Höning, N., & La Poutré, H. (2010). Designing comprehensible self-organising systems. In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems. IEEE Computer Society. doi:10.1109/SASO.2010.18 |
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