SISSY - Workshop on Self-Improving System Integration

Information and communication technology (ICT) pervades every aspect of our daily lives. This inclusion changes our communities and all of our human interactions. It also presents a significant set of challenges in correctly designing and integrating our resulting technical systems. For instance, the embedding of ICT functionality in more and more devices (such as household appliances or thermostats) leads to novel interconnections and a changing structure of the overall system. Not only are technical systems increasingly coupled, but also numerous previously isolated natural and human systems have merged into a kind of overall system-of-systems ‐ an interwoven system structure.

This change of structure is fundamental and affects the whole production cycle of technical systems; standard system integration and testing is not feasible any more. The increasingly complex challenges of developing the right type of modelling, analysis, and infrastructure for designing and maintaining ICT infrastructures has continued to motivate the self‐organising, autonomic and organic computing systems community. Integration is more than just putting things together. Consequently, this workshop intends to study novel approaches to system-of-systems integration, maintenance and testing by applying self‐* principles. Specifically, we seek approaches that allow for a continual process of self‐integration among components and systems that are self‐improving and evolving over time towards an optimised and stable solution.

Although research in self‐organising systems such as the Organic Computing (OC) and Autonomic Computing (AC) initiatives has seen more almost two decades of exiting development, in which there has been considerable success in building individual systems, OC/AC is faced with the difficult challenge of integrating multiple self‐ organising systems, and integrating self‐organising systems with traditionally engineered ones as well as with human organisations. Meanwhile, although there has been important development in system-of-systems methodologies (e.g., Service‐oriented Architectures, Cloud technology, etc.), many of these developments lack scalable methods for rapidly proving that new configurations of components/subsystems are correctly used or that the impact of their changes runs into verified results or that these frameworks have pulled together the best possible context‐sensitive configuration of resources for a user or for another system.

SISSY workshop continues the successful predecessors held at the IEEE International Conference on Self‐ Adaptive and Self‐Organising Systems (SASO’14) 2014 in London, UK; at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC’15) 2015 in Grenoble, France; at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC’16) 2016 in Würzburg, Germany; at the IEEE International Conference on Self‐ Adaptive and Self‐Organising Systems (SASO’17) 2017 in Tucson, US; at the IEEE Foundations and Applications of Self-* Systems Conference (FAS*’18) 2018 in Trento, Italy; at the IEEE Foundations and Applications of Self-* Systems Conference (FAS*’19) 2019, in Ůmea, Sweden, online as part of the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS’20, ACSOS’21, and ACSOS’22), and at IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS’23) held in Toronto, Canada.

The workshop intends to focus on the important work of applying self‐* principles to the integration of "Interwoven Systems" (where an "Interwoven System" is a system cutting across several technical domains, combining traditionally engineered systems, systems making use of self‐* properties and methods, and human systems). The goal of the workshop is to identify key challenges involved in creating self‐integrating systems and consider methods to achieve continuous self‐improvement for this integration process. The workshop specifically targets an interdisciplinary community of researchers (i.e. from systems engineering, complex adaptive systems, socio‐technical systems, and the OC/AC domains) in the hope that collective expertise from a range of domains can be leveraged to drive forward research in the area.