Emergence phenomena in self-organizing systems: a systematic literature review of concepts, researches, and future prospects

ABSTRACT Context Today, we are facing the growing development of distributed systems which their vast scale has challenged their centralized management. Therefore, many researchers design these systems as self-organizing. After implementing self-organizing systems, new behaviors known as emergence form at a global level of the system. Objective The purpose of this paper is to study the concept of emergence in various natural and artificial systems, categorize research activities, identify research pathways of emergence in computer science, and shed light on future research directions. Method In this paper, for a systematic literature review, numerous articles regarding emergence phenomena in self-organizing systems are studied and investigated. Result Emergence is one of the issues that has attracted the attention of researchers these days. In this paper, concerning nine research questions, 180 research papers are studied. In addition to exploring definitions and features of emergence, a variety of research interests has been found, including studies on why and how to identify, measure, validate, predict, model, simulate, and control emergence. Conclusion This study shows that much research had been done not only in computer science but also in other sciences on emergence. In addition to a need to provide new methods, based on various technologies, for identifying, measuring, verifying, modeling, simulating, predicting, and controlling emergence in future research, there is a lack of work regarding many issues on emergence.