Emergence phenomena in self-organizing systems: a systematic literature review of concepts, researches, and future prospects

ABSTRACT

Context

Today, we are facing the growing development of distributed systems which their vast scale has challenged their centralized management. Therefore, many researchers design these systems as self-organizing. After implementing self-organizing systems, new behaviors known as emergence form at a global level of the system.

Objective

The purpose of this paper is to study the concept of emergence in various natural and artificial systems, categorize research activities, identify research pathways of emergence in computer science, and shed light on future research directions.

Method

In this paper, for a systematic literature review, numerous articles regarding emergence phenomena in self-organizing systems are studied and investigated.

Result

Emergence is one of the issues that has attracted the attention of researchers these days. In this paper, concerning nine research questions, 180 research papers are studied. In addition to exploring definitions and features of emergence, a variety of research interests has been found, including studies on why and how to identify, measure, validate, predict, model, simulate, and control emergence.

Conclusion

This study shows that much research had been done not only in computer science but also in other sciences on emergence. In addition to a need to provide new methods, based on various technologies, for identifying, measuring, verifying, modeling, simulating, predicting, and controlling emergence in future research, there is a lack of work regarding many issues on emergence.

KEYWORDS:

• Emergence
• self-organizing systems
• emergent structure
• emergent behavior
• systematic literature review

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Somayeh Kalantari

Somayeh Kalantari was born in Zanjan, Iran, in 1981. He got the BSc. degree in Software Engineering in 2003 and the MSc. degree in Software Engineering in 2012 from the Islamic Azad University, Qazvin,Iran. She is a PhD. candidate in Software Engineering at the Islamic Azad University of Qazvin. Her research interests concern the study of Software engineering, Evolutionary Algorithms, Job Scheduling Problems, Multi-agent Systems, Self-Adaptive Systems, and Self-Organizing Systems.

Eslam Nazemi

Eslam Nazemi was born in Sarab, Iran, in 1954. He got the BSc. degree in Applied Mathematics and Operational Research from School of Planning and Computer Application, Tehran, Iran in 1977, The MSc. degree in Both System Engineering and Economics in 1987 and 1996, and PhD. in Industrial engineering and Information technology in 2005, Iran. He was the faculty Member from 1978 in School of Planning and Computer application and then from 1986 to the present, he has been with the Computer Engineering Faculty at Shahid Beheshti University(SBU), Tehran, Iran. He was deputy of graduate and education affairs, manager of informatics development of education in SBU and now is the manager of Electronic Education Center in SBU. He is an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering &It Department. His main fields of research are Self-* Software Engineering, Large Scale Software Development, and Self- Adaptive Software quality. He has authored and coauthored more the 100 papers in Journals and Conferences and has 10 books on mathematics, project management, software engineering, Software Quality and game theory.

Behrooz Masoumi

Behrooz Masoumi received his B.S. and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering in 1995, 1998, and 2010, respectively. He joined the faculty of the Computer and IT Engineering Department at Qazvin Azad University, Qazvin, Iran, in 1998. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Computer and IT Engineering Department. His research interests include learning systems, multi-agent systems, social network and soft computing.