Guiding the Self-organization of Cyber-Physical Systems

TL;DR

This paper reviews concepts and approaches for enabling self-organization in cyber-physical systems, highlighting real-world applications like urban mobility and discussing control strategies for different scenarios.

Contribution

It summarizes various methods for facilitating self-organization in cyber-physical systems and discusses their application and control strategies in real-world contexts.

Findings

Self-organization can improve adaptability and performance in cyber-physical systems.

Real-world examples show self-organization outperforms classical approaches.

Control strategy choice depends on system context and requirements.

Abstract

Self-organization offers a promising approach for designing adaptive systems. Given the inherent complexity of most cyber-physical systems, adaptivity is desired, as predictability is limited. Here I summarize different concepts and approaches that can facilitate self-organization in cyber-physical systems, and thus be exploited for design. Then I mention real-world examples of systems where self-organization has managed to provide solutions that outperform classical approaches, in particular related to urban mobility. Finally, I identify when a centralized, distributed, or self-organizing control is more appropriate.