Applicability of Emergence Engineering to Distributed Systems Scenarios

Abstract Genetic Programming can be effectively used to create emergent be-havior for a group of autonomous agents. In the process we call Offline Emer-gence Engineering, the behavior is at first bred in a Genetic Programming envi-ronment and then deployed to the agents in the real environment. In this article we shortly describe our approach, introduce an extended behavioral rule syntax, and discuss the impact of the expressiveness of the behavioral description to the gen-eration success, using two scenarios in comparison: the election problem and the distributed critical section problem. We evaluate the results, formulating criteria for the applicability of our approach.