Integration Framework for Simulation Tools to Engineer Emergent Self-Organizing Behavior

This paper presents a simulation tool integration framework which aims to integrate tools from various research fields in order to provide a seamless design flow for distributed systems with Emergent Self-Organization (ESO). ESO is a decentralized dynamic process with many favorable properties which makes it attractive for large scale distributed systems. However, ESO has a "non-linear" and "random" nature requiring expertise and tools from various research fields. Instead of extending every simulator and modeling framework to contain some of the required tools we propose a tool integration framework consisting of a repository of ESO design tools together with an integration infrastructure. The tools can be immediately used, thus significantly reducing development time and helping to fully explore the potential of ESO. Moreover, these tools can be created by experts on various aspects of ESO and seamlessly used in any relevant application domain. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed framework by showing how it can be used to improve an existing self-organizing data collection algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks.