Collective Adaptation in Process-Based Systems

A collective adaptive system is composed of a set of heterogeneous, autonomous and self-adaptive entities that come into a collaboration with one another in order to improve the effectiveness with which they can accomplish their individual goals. In this paper, we offer a characterization of ensembles, as the main concept around which systems that exhibit collective adaptability can be built. Our conceptualization of ensembles enables to define a collective adaptive system as an emergent aggregation of autonomous and self-adaptive process-based elements. To elucidate our approach to ensembles and collective adaptation, we draw an example from a scenario in the urban mobility domain, we describe an architecture that enables that approach, and we show how our approach can address the problems posed by the motivating scenario.