The concept of self-organization has been examined oftentimes for several domains such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, etc. However, the current technical development opens a new field of self-organizing applications by creating systems of networked and massively distributed hardware with self-organized control. Having this view in mind, this papers reviews the questions: What is a self-organizing system?, What is it not?, Should there be a separate field of science for self-organizing systems?, and What are possible approaches to engineer a self-organizing control system?.
The presented ideas have been elaborated at the Lakeside Research Days’08 (University of Klagenfurt, Austria), a workshop that featured guided discussions between invited experts working in the field of self-organizing systems.