Design patterns for decentralised coordination in self-organising emergent systems

There is little or no guidance to systematically design a self-organising emergent solution that achieves the desired macroscopic behaviour. This paper describes decentralised coordination mechanisms such as gradient fields as design patterns, similar to patterns used in mainstream software engineering. As a consequence, a structured consolidation of best practice in using each coordination mechanism becomes available to guide engineers in applying them, and to directly decide which mechanisms are promising to solve a certain problem. As such, self-organising emergent solutions can be engineered more systematically, which is illustrated in a packet delivery service application. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.status: publishe