NIVEL DE RENDIMIENTO ACADEMICO

specially in the academic domain of EPS/EAS in particular:

• MAS - oriented: [34,35] preliminary implementations on a didatic kit based on the CoBASA architecture but featuring material handling.

• Web Service - oriented: [36] a similar implementation exploring web service tech- nology in particular the emerging Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) stack. Some basic self-organization mechanisms were explored in these papers that eventu- ally led to the solution presented in this work.

2.2

On Emergence, Self-Organization and Mechatronic Systems

2.2.1 Emergence

Emergence and Self-organization are central concepts in recent production paradigms and architectures. They are also frequently used in an loosely way. The concept of emer- gence is attributed to G. H. Lewes. Lewes observed that "although each effect is the resultant of its components, we cannot always trace the steps of the process, so as to see in the product the mode of operation of each factor" [37]. Holland supports roughly the same definition: "there are regularities in system behaviour that are not revealed by direct inspection of the laws satisfied by the components" [38]. If one inspects other definitions of emergence the notion that the whole is more than the sum of the parts dangerously emerges to "raise the spectre of illegitimately getting something out of nothing" [39].

There appears to be several ingredients to identify emergence. Whether or not the observer is one of these decisive ingredients is one of the most relevant discussion top- ics. While some authors deem the observer necessary, see for instance [40] that claims that "the concept of emergence is much better captured through the sound analysis of the observer’s structure", others reject the observer as condition to identify emergence [41]. There is a very important qualitative, phenotype-like, dimension of emergence that con- veys significance to the observer which is generally rejected by pure reductionists. This debate revolves around the "how" and the "why". While pure reductionists contend that emergence is associated with a certain degree of ignorance from the observer in respect to the "how", they often neglect the "why" which, due to the observer’s inability to fully grasp the causal matrix, hinders pure determinism and prevents him from, in most cases, relating the mechanisms that explain how a set of parts lead to useful phenomena as an whole [42]. The why normally relates to a set of observable properties which can be more or less salient according to [37]:

• "Radical novelty: emergents have features that are not previously observed in the complex system under observation. This novelty is the source of the claim that

2. STATE-OF-THE-ART 2.2. On Emergence, Self-Organization and Mechatronic Systems

features of emergents are neither predictable nor deducible from lower or micro- level components. In other words, radically novel emergents are not able to be anticipated in their full richness before they actually show themselves."

• "Coherence or correlation: emergents appear as integrated wholes that tend to maintain some sense of identity over time. This coherence spans and correlates the separate lower-level components into a higher-level unity."

• "Global or macro level: since coherence represents a correlation that spans separate components, the locus of emergent phenomena occurs at a global or macro level, in contrast to the micro-level locus of their components. Observation of emergents, therefore, is of their behaviour on this macro level."

• "Dynamical: emergent phenomena are not pre-given wholes but arise as a complex system evolves over time. As a dynamical construct, emergence is associated with the arising of new attractors in dynamical systems (i.e., bifurcation)."

• "Ostensive: emergents are recognized by showing themselves, i.e., they are osten- sively recognized. (...)Because of the nature of complex systems, each ostensive showing of emergent phenomena will be different to some degree from previous ones."

In [43] the following properties are additionally considered as pertaining to emer- gence:

• "Interacting parts - The parts need to interact - parallelism is not enough. Without interactions, interesting macro-level behaviours will never arise. The emergents arise from the interactions between the parts."

• "Decentralized control - Decentralized control is using only local mechanisms to influence global behaviour. There is no central control. i.e. no single part of the system directs the macro level behaviour. The actions of the parts are controllable. The whole is not directly controllable (...)"

• "Two-Way Link - In emergent systems there is a bidirectional link between the macro-level and the micro level, the parts give rise to an emergent structure. (...) In the other direction, the emergent structure influences the parts"

• "Robustness and Flexibility - (...) Emergents are relatively insensitive to perturba- tions or errors (...)"

If one considers the observer a fundamental part in the identification of emergence then time and scale of the observation are also fundamental ingredients of emergence. In this context Castelfranchi [44] proposes a threefold classification of emergence:

2. STATE-OF-THE-ART 2.2. On Emergence, Self-Organization and Mechatronic Systems

• Diachronic emergence - is a time based process requiring a favourable convergence of factors, typically the critical accumulation of "components, or ingredients and forerunners of that phenomena" that in the right mix can trigger a disruption in the system leading to different system phases.

• Synchronic emergence - is related to the point and scale of the observation process itself. From a specific point of view correlations between otherwise uncorrelated entities may become evident.

• Descriptive emergence - relates to the description of emergence properties in the macro level where they are visible and measurable. It is a form of emergence that suits the observers descriptive purposes in respect to the observed system.

It is however difficult to devise rules on how to decide on the time frame and scale of the observations. The link between emergence and self-organization has been widely debated.

2.2.2 Self-Organization

A general definition of self-organization is: "a system is self-organizing if it acquires a spatial, temporal or functional structure without specific interference from the outside. By specific we mean that the structure or functioning is not impressed on the system, but that the system is acted upon from the outside in a non specific fashion"[45].

Self-organization is often observed in natural systems yet in most cases the organiza- tion of these systems happens at critical state. This sort of organization is typically cited in the literature as Self-Organized Criticality (SOC). The concept is normally attributed to Bak, Tang and Wisenfeld when they proposed the sandpile model as an example of the quantification of SOC [46]. As detailed in [46] "the system naturally evolves to the state without detailed specification of initial conditions (i.e. the critical state is an attrac- tor of the dynamics). Moreover, the critical state is robust with respect to variations of parameters, and the presence of quenched randomness".

As detailed in [43] this ability to retain order is fundamental in the characterization of self-organization and further, in addition to the previously described properties, in the identification of pure emergent systems, pure self-organizing systems or systems that denote both.

Context seems to decisively influence the identification of emergence and self-organization. In the domain of emerging production paradigms both concepts have become buzz words and are often loosely applied to describe mechatronic systems that can adapt to changing conditions very often by adjusting processes’ parametrization or, in extremely rare cases, their physical/mechanical configuration. There is generally a scarcity of metrics that de- termine the degree of qualitative novelty (arguably emergence) or organization when