Editorial: Special Issue on Organic Computing

Organic Computing has emerged recently as a challenging vision for future infor-mation processing systems, based on the insight that we will soon be surrounded by systems with massive numbers of processing elements, sensors and actuators. Because of the scale and complexity of these systems it is infeasible to monitor and control them entirely from external observations; instead they will need to widely monitor, control and adapt themselves. To do so, these components will need to be aware of their environment, to communicate freely, and to organize themselves in order to perform the required actions and services. The presence of such networks of intelligent systems in our environment opens up fascinating application areas but, at the same time, bears the problem of their controllability. Hence, these sys-tems must be as robust, safe, and trustworthy as possible. In order to achieve all these goals, computing systems will have to act more independently, flexibly, and autonomously. Currently, only living beings have these properties to a satisfactory degree. There-fore, Organic Computing puts special emphasis on systems that exhibit some life