The current research trends in software engineering are focusing on the development of new techniques to deal intelligently and efficiently with the design of systems that are able to evolve overtime and adapt to rapid changes of their requirements. In particular, the field of autonomic computing has been created to study these types of systems with the ultimate aim to create systems that are able to self-configure, self-optimize, self-heal and self-protect without any external intervention. What we study in this paper is a set of the most relevant bio-inspired principles that may be applied to these systems. We discuss how to apply them to develop or adapt self-organization algorithms to real evolvable systems and we present two examples of applications that we have developed.