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 technical systems are increasingly coupled, a variety of previously isolated natural and human systems have consolidated 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.

In this workshop, we intend to study novel approaches to system of system integration and testing by applying self-* principles; specifically we want approaches that allow for a continual process of self-integration among components and systems that is 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 an exciting decade of development,with 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 naturally occurring human organisations. Meanwhile, despite 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 their changes verified or that these frameworks have pulled together the best possible context-sensitive configuration of resources for a user or another system.

The SISSY workshop continues the successful predecessors held at IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organising Systems (SASO14) 2014 in London, UK; IEEE/ACM International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC15) 2015 in Grenobles, France; at IEEE/ACM International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC16) 2016 in Würzburg, Germany; at IEEE SASO & ICAC (FAS*) 2017 in Tucson, USA; at IEEE SASO & ICAC (FAS*) 2018 in Trento, Italy; at the IEEE Foundations and Applications of Self-* Systems Conference (FAS*'19) 2019, in Ůmea, Sweden; and at the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS20), 2020, in Washington, DC, USA (held online).

The workshop intends to focus on  applying self-X 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-X 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.

Specifically, but not limited to, we are looking for work presenting ideas and approaches inspired by nature, ecology, and society to overcoming these challenges. 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.

Special Focus 2021: Multi-scale SISSY

Multi-scale systems consist of processes that operate simultaneously, at different scales, in terms of space, time and/or information granularity. E.g., sub-atomic particles self-integrate into atoms, which in turn self-integrate into organic molecules, then cells, and organisms. Or, foraging ants self-organise individual actions (lower scale) based on a collectively-created pheromone path (higher-scale, coarser information, slower change).

Generally, multi-scale systems allow modelling their different scales almost independently from each other -- i.e. only relying on abstractions of adjacent scales, while ignoring details of other scales (e.g. different disciplines for particle physics, molecular biology and morphogenesis). However, processes operating at different scales impact on each other. E.g. atom formation stabilizes and limits its sub-particle movements, the same holding for atoms within molecules, molecules within cells and cells within organisms. Similarly, the pheromone path is created by individual ants, whose behaviors are, in turn, guided by the pheromone path. In complex technical systems, such as space systems, the properties of one subsystem can have surprising and at times unfortunate interactions with other subsystems; many "side-effects" are the results of impacts of different levels of different subsystems. E.g., simultaneously executing sub-systems can collectively increase local temperature, create electromagnetic fields or information overloads, which may, in turn, impact the communication bus or other system functions.

This year's SISSY workshop aims to explore complex SISSY systems where multiple self-integrating and self-improving processes operate simultaneously, at various scales, impacting each other in various ways. All subjects of interest to SISSY are relevant here, with a specific focus on their multi-scale aspects and their role in overall system properties, such as efficacity, stability, flexibility or controllability.