Workshop „ Adaptive and Organic Systems “ Munich , September 12 , 2008

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, communicating freely, and organizing 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.