A method fragments approach to methodologies for engineering self-organising systems

This article summarizes five relevant methods for developing self-organizing multiagent systems. It identifies their most relevant aspects and provides a description of each one under the form of method fragments expressed using SPEM (Software and System Process Engineering Metamodel). The use of a “metamodel” to describe fragments facilitates the comparison of the methods and their respective fragments. These fragments can be combined and be part of a more general ad hoc methodology, created according to the needs of the designer. Self-organizing traffic lights controllers and self-organizing displays are chosen as case studies to illustrate the methods and to underline which fragments are important for self-organizing systems. Finally, we illustrate how to augment PASSI2, an agent-based methodology which does not consider self-organization aspects, with some of the identified fragments for self-organization.