Introduction

Abstract

Because of their large-scale, maintenance constraints, highly changing requirements or the dynamic environment they are situated in, current software systems need to adapt and evolve with a minimum of user intervention. Self-organising software is an answer to these requirements, allowing one to achieve complex adaptive tasks from the interactions of relatively simple individual behaviours without specific external or internal central control. This book provides a comprehensive picture of self-organising software by considering four main axes: a description of self-organising concepts, a detailed review of self-organising mechanisms governing the behaviour of self-organising systems, engineering techniques supporting a systematic development of these systems and extensive description of application areas where self-organising software has been successfully applied.