|
Goals / Ideas
Organic Computing has emerged recently as a challenging vision for future information processing
systems. Organic Computing is based on the insight that we will soon be surrounded by large collections of autonomous
systems, which are equipped with sensors and actuators, aware of their environment, communicate freely, and organize
themselves in order to perform the actions and services that seem to be required.
The presence of networks of intelligent systems in our environment opens fascinating application areas but, at the same
time, bears the problem of their controllability. Hence, we have to construct such systems - which we increasingly depend
on - as robust, safe, flexible, and trustworthy as possible. In particular, a strong orientation towards human needs as
opposed to a pure implementation of the technologically possible seems absolutely central. In order to achieve these goals,
our technical systems will have to act more independently, flexibly, and autonomously, i.e. they will have to exhibit
life-like properties. We call those systems "organic". Hence, an "Organic Computing System" is a
technical system, which adapts dynamically to the current conditions of its environment. It will be self-organizing,
self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing, self-protecting, self-explaining, and context-aware.
The vision of Organic Computing and its fundamental concepts arose independently in different research
areas like Neuroscience, Molecular Biology, and Computer Engineering. Self-organizing systems have been studied for quite
some time by mathematicians, sociologists, physicists, economists, and computer scientists, but so far almost exclusively
based on strongly simplified artificial models. Central aspects of Organic Computing systems have been and will be inspired
by an analysis of information processing in biological systems.
Link DFG priority programme 1183
http://www.organic-computing.de/spp