This book is a comprehensive introduction into Organic Computing (OC) presenting
systematically the current state-of-the-art in OC. It starts with motivating examples of
self-organising self-adaptive and emergent systems derives their common characteristics and
explains the fundamental ideas for a formal characterisation of such systems. Special emphasis
is given to a quantitative treatment of concepts like self-organisation emergence autonomy
robustness and adaptivity. The book shows practical examples of architectures for OC systems
and their applications in traffic control grid computing sensor networks robotics and smart
camera systems. The extension of single OC systems into collective systems consisting of social
agents based on concepts like trust and reputation is explained. OC makes heavy use of learning
and optimisation technologies a compact overview of these technologies and related approaches
to self-organising systems is provided. So far OC literature has been published with the
researcher in mind. Although the existing books have tried to follow a didactical concept they
remain basically collections of scientific papers. A comprehensive and systematic account of
the OC ideas methods and achievements in the form of a textbook which lends itself to the
newcomer in this field has been missing so far. The targeted reader of this book is the master
student in Computer Science Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering - or any other
newcomer to the field of Organic Computing with some technical or Computer Science background.
Readers can seek access to OC ideas from different perspectives: OC can be viewed (1) as a
philosophy of adaptive and self-organising - life-like - technical systems (2) as an approach
to a more quantitative and formal understanding of such systems and finally (3) a construction
method for the practitioner who wants to build such systems. In this book we first try to
convey to the reader a feeling of the special character of natural and technical
self-organising and adaptive systems through a large number of illustrative examples. Then we
discuss quantitative aspects of such forms of organisation and finally we turn to methods of
how to build such systems for practical applications.
