Quantitative Robustness – A Generalised Approach to Compare the Impact of Disturbances in Self-organising Systems
Jan Kantert, Sven Tomforde, Christian Müller-Schloer, Sarah Edenhofer, Bernhard Sick · 2017
Organic Computing (OC) and Autonomic Computing (AC) systems are distinct from conventional systems through their ability to self-adapt and to self-organise. However, these properties are just means and not the end. What really makes OC and AC systems useful is their ability to survive in a real world, i.e. to recover from disturbances and attacks from the outside world. This property is called robustness. In this paper, we propose a metric to gauge robustness in order to be able to quantitatively compare the effectiveness of different self-organising and self-adaptive system designs with each other. In the following, we apply this metric to three experimental application scenarios and discuss their usefulness.