Collaboration as an Emergent Property of Self-Organizing Software Systems

Given an open, dynamically adaptive software system whose components are agents with their respective interests, goals and objectives, this PhD project will develop a methodology to allow the components to establish collaboration without the governance of a central control unit, but rather as an emergent function of the system itself. The interaction of the components relies on different layers of abstraction, providing a generic communication protocol as well as semantic integration and overarching rules ('laws of nature'). The work focuses on modeling and analyzing the top layer of this framework: An emergent Governance Layer which allows the components to strategically interact with each other, aggregates individual preferences, and has the ability to reconcile interests and to lead to collaborative actions in a meaningful way.