1st International ICST Workshop on Technologies for Situated and Autonomic Communications

Research Article

Autonomic Supervision of Stigmergic Self-Organisation for Distributed Information Retrieval

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.BIONETICS2007.2357,
        author={Kieran Greer and Matthias Baumgarten and Maurice Mulvenna and Kevin Curran and Chris Nugent},
        title={Autonomic Supervision of Stigmergic Self-Organisation for Distributed Information Retrieval},
        proceedings={1st International ICST Workshop on Technologies for Situated and Autonomic Communications},
        proceedings_a={SAC},
        year={2008},
        month={8},
        keywords={Stigmergy   self-adaptation   self-organisation   supervision},
        doi={10.4108/ICST.BIONETICS2007.2357}
    }
    
  • Kieran Greer
    Matthias Baumgarten
    Maurice Mulvenna
    Kevin Curran
    Chris Nugent
    Year: 2008
    Autonomic Supervision of Stigmergic Self-Organisation for Distributed Information Retrieval
    SAC
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.4108/ICST.BIONETICS2007.2357
Kieran Greer1,*, Matthias Baumgarten1,*, Maurice Mulvenna1,*, Kevin Curran2,*, Chris Nugent1,*
  • 1: School of Computing and Mathematics, Faculty of Computing and Engineering, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, UK.
  • 2: School of Computing and Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Computing and Engineering, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, UK.
*Contact email: krc.greer@ulster.ac.uk, m.baumgarten@ulster.ac.uk, md.mulvenna@ulster.ac.uk, kj.curran@ulster.ac.uk, cd.nugent@ulster.ac.uk

Abstract

This paper will consider how a network of information sources might be autonomously monitored to allow it to self-optimise with respect to querying. While future networks will need to be able to self-adapt, the dynamic and autonomous nature of such networks will make the supervision process more difficult to implement in programming terms. Stigmergic linking is a lightweight and flexible way to provide some form of optimisation. If evaluation functions can also measure the success of any query, then it may be possible to monitor the performance of the self-optimisation. A supervision system could adjust the link update method until an acceptable balance between search time and quality of service is reached. Thus at least in this respect, autonomic supervision would be possible. The monitoring system might also monitor ‘concept drift’ and detect when it occurs. This measures typical boundaries for concepts of interest and detects when these boundaries are violated. When concept drift occurs, the system would be able to tell if this resulted from a fault or simply a change in the system use and thus be able to apply the appropriate solution.