Foundations and formalizations of self-organization

“The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com”. copyright Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-84628-982-8_2 [Full text of this item is not available in the UHRA]In the study of complex systems, the relevance of the phenomenon of self-organization is ubiquitous. For example the stripe formation in morphogenesis (Meinhardt 1972, 1982) reaction-diffusion automata (Turing 1952) the re-organization of a self-organizing Kohonen map, the seemingly effortless distributed organization of work in an ant colony, the formation of flows in pedestrian movement patterns (Helbing et al 2005) , the maintenance and creation of the complexities involved in the maintenance of life in living cells all produce behaviour that, in one way or another, can be called "organized" and if the source of organization is not explicitly identified outside of the system, it can be called "self-organization". [opening paragraph