Utilizing Stigmergy in Support of Autonomic Principles

Learning by nature has always been a source of inspiration for various kinds of developments in different domains. So called bio-inspired mechanisms, such as stigmergy, swarm behavior or heart beat monitoring have been utilized in various systems in order to take advantage of principles that have not only been evolved by nature but have been proven to be effective. Recently, such mechanisms have received a special interest from the area of autonomic computing where they are seen to be highly relevant to support autonomic features such as self-organization and self-adaptation. This paper evaluates the use of stigmergic mechanisms in order to support such autonomic principles. In particular, three distinct use-cases will be evaluated, which use stigmergy to facilitate or optimize their behavior. The concepts proposed will be applied to a new type of knowledge provisioning system, namely Knowledge Networks, which will be used as a running example throughout. Furthermore, relevant concepts of stigmergy are formally defined and a working prototype is outlined.