Self-Managing Systems Interdisciplinary Research: Roles for Self-Organization

No generally accepted principles and guidelines currently exist to help engineers design local interaction mechanisms that result in a desired global behavior. However, several communities have developed ways of approaching this problem in the context of niched application areas. Because the ideas underlying these approaches are often obscured or underemphasized in technical papers, we invited representatives of several communities to review the role of self-organization in their work. These short articles round out this special issue by drawing a better picture of the status of the emerging field of self-organizing systems. Radhika Nagpal reviews the motivations, results, and possible future of amorphous computing. This research intends to lay the foundations of self-organization by developing principles and programming languages. It has a wide range of potential applications including microfabrication and cellular engineering. Nagpal use