A Software Engineering Guideline for Self-Organizing Resource-Flow Systems

When introducing self-organization into a system, its developer aims to reduce the system’s complexity, during development as well as during operation. More often than not, the self-organization mechanism is ingenious, highly tweaked for the system under construction and not reproducible or reusable by other developers or in other projects. This paper introduces a software engineering guideline for self-organizing resource-flow systems along with an elaborated pattern that describes the elements of the system under construction and their collaboration. Together, guideline and pattern are the basis for a well-defined approach for the design and construction of systems in this class, which includes, among others, logistics applications, and adaptive production systems. They therefore allow developers to achieve reproducible results within a documented design framework, leverage the possibilities of the underlying formal approach and reuse self organization mechanisms tailored for the system class. The paper demonstrates the application of the guideline with a running example.