SISSY 2015 - International Workshop on Self-Improving System Integration

Information and communication technology (ICT) pervades every aspect of our daily lives. This inclusion changes our communities and all of our human interactions. It also presents a significant set of challenges in correctly designing and integrating our resulting technical systems. For instance, the embedding of ICT functionality in more and more devices (such as household appliances or thermostats) leads to novel interconnections and a changing structure of the overall system. Not only technical systems are increasingly coupled, a variety of previously isolated natural and human systems have consolidated into a kind of overall system of systems - an interwoven system structure.
This change of structure is fundamental and affects the whole production cycle of technical systems ? standard system integration and testing is not feasible any more. The increasingly complex challenges of developing the right type of modelling, analysis, and infrastructure for designing and maintaining ICT infrastructures has continued to motivate the self-organising, autonomic and organic computing systems community.
In this workshop, we intend to study novel approaches to system of system integration and testing by applying self-* principles; specifically we want approaches that allow for a continual process of self-integration among components and systems that is self-improving and evolving over time towards an optimised and stable solution.
Although research in self-organising systems ? such as the Organic Computing (OC) and Autonomic Computing (AC) initiatives ? has seen an exciting decade of development, in which there has been considerable success in building individual systems, OC/AC is faced with the difficult challenge of integrating multiple self-organising systems, and integrating self-organising systems with traditionally engineered ones as well as naturally occurring human organisations. Meanwhile, although there has been important development in system of systems methodologies (e.g., Service-oriented Architectures, clouds technology etc.), many of these developments lack scalable methods for rapidly proving that new configurations of components/subsystems are correctly used or their changes verified or that these frameworks have pulled together the best possible context-sensitive configuration of resources for a user or another system.
The SISSY workshop continues the successful predecessor held at the Eight IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organising Systems (SASO14), held 2014 in London, UK. The workshop intends to focus on the important work of applying self-X principles to the integration of “Interwoven Systems" (where an "Interwoven System" is a system cutting across several technical domains, combining traditionally engineered systems, systems making use of self-X properties and methods, and human systems). The goal of the workshop is to identify key challenges involved in creating self-integrating systems and consider methods to achieve continuous self-improvement for this integration process. The workshop specifically targets an interdisciplinary community of researchers (i.e. from systems engineering, complex adaptive systems, socio-technical systems, and the OC/AC domains) in the hope that collective expertise from a range of domains can be leveraged to drive forward research in the area.
Topics
The overall message of the workshop covers different fields of research that will be part of the scope for accepted papers and discussions:
Properties that an OC/AC-based system integration could enable
Self-x properties applied to systems Integration
self-improving
self-monitoring
self-modelling
Methods for self-integration
continuous and evolving Integration
self-improving over time
guidance by models
collaboration schemes
Approaches for self-modelling at runtime
Quantification of the system integration’s quality and Performance
System integration with uncertainty
Implications on traditional design processes
Implications of the OC design notion on today‘s perception of design flows and tools
Trade-off between bottom-up design and pre-fabrication
Overhead in form of redundant system resources
Provisioning to allow for self-organised functional enhancement
Provisioning to allow for performance enhancement at runtime
Further topics connected to the overall message will be also accepted.
Audience
This workshop intends to bring together two currently separate lines of research and development, Organic Computing/Autonomic System development (OC/AS) and Complex systems/system of systems design and development (SoS), to the mutual benefit of both fields. Recent activities in the Organic Computing area not only showed that OC applications have already crossed over from single systems to interwoven systems (with examples of such drawn from power systems, public transportation systems, medical systems etc.) but also gave the group several new ideas on what new properties an OC/AS system integration could enable. Similarly, recent activities in CSDM showed that the system engineering community has great interest in adopting ideas on self-awareness and self-organization from the OC/AS community.