A Pattern-Based Architectural Style for Self-Organizing Software Systems

We present an architectural style for selforganizing software systems, which leverages a catalog of design patterns for self-organization. The catalog, which represent our prior work, defines a number of bio-inspired selforganization mechanism as design patterns, and shows how more abstract and complex forms of self-organization can be composed from simpler, lower-level mechanisms. We now discuss e how the design patterns in our catalog can be situated and accommodated within an architectural style that uses them as building blocks to support the engineering of selforganizing software systems. Our style, which has a general layered organization, highlights the role of an Environment layer, which provisions several elementary and atomic selforganization mechanisms, which we call Core primitives. Those are leveraged by more sophisticated self-organizing mechanisms, which are requested on demand as Services by application-level Agents to effect their own individual selforganization behaviors. According to this layered organization, a full-fledged self-organized application activates agents with the appropriate behaviors, and parameterizes those behaviors according to its overarching requirements. We fully describe this architectural style, highlighting its merits and limitations, and discuss a possible implementation. Keywords-self-organization; design patterns; bio-inspired algorithms