Overview

Man-made self-organizing systems date back to antiquity; for example, elaborate water clocks found from Alexandria (Ctesibius's clepsydra) to Seoul (King Sejong's Chagyongnu) were designed to keep constant rates or strike at regular time intervals without human adjustment. More modern examples include Watt's centrifugal governor, Black's negative feedback amplifier, and Nyquist's stability test, which enabled engineered systems to stabilize themselves. These and numerous innovations in control theory and engineering optimization have contributed much to modern communications technology. But there is a need for advances in both methods and applications beyond what has been achieved in the precise settings of mechanical, electronic, and optical switching and transmission towards the self-management and control of large-scale systems with many interacting and semi-autonomous components. Natural phenomena may be a guide for us, a model for self-organized decentralized systems. Spontaneous magnetization, crystallization, lasers, and superconductivity are examples of structural self-organization in physics where cohesive behavior emerges from initial disorder. In self-assembly and auto-catalytic networks in chemistry, molecules organize themselves in well-ordered arrangements without external action, and in biology, we observe highly complex coordinated action as in the folding of proteins, homeostasis, and flocking.