8Organically Grown Architectures: Creating Decentralized, Autonomous Systems by Embryomorphic Engineering

Summary. Exploding growth in computational systems forces us to gradually re-place rigid design and control with decentralization and autonomy. Information technologies will progress, instead, by“meta-designing ” mechanisms of system self-assembly, self-regulation and evolution. Nature offers a great variety of efficient complex systems, in which numerous small elements form large-scale, adaptive pat-terns. The new engineering challenge is to recreate this self-organization and let it freely generate innovative designs under guidance. This article presents an original model of artificial system growth inspired by embryogenesis. A virtual organism is a lattice of cells that proliferate, migrate and self-pattern into differentiated domains. Each cell’s fate is controlled by an internal gene regulatory network. Embryomorphic engineering emphasizes hyperdistributed architectures, and their development as a prerequisite of evolutionary design. Key words: complex systems, artificial development, evolutionary computation, systems design, embryomorphic engineering 8.1 Introduction: designing complexit