Regulated Autonomy: A Case Study

Actual control and decision support systems rely more and more on distributed software systems. A central aspect in the design of these systems is the selection of an appropriate level of local autonomy of these subsystems in the decision making process. Most of the research focuses on the regulation of these entities towards an integration of centralized control strategies or a strict local autonomy, so far. Both aspects are margins of a scale and it can be expected that for certain applications a balance between autonomy and regulations has to be found. In this article, we present first steps towards a dynamic regulation of autonomous decision taking in order to design these adaptive decision support systems that try to solve the conflict between local autonomy and global system performance.