Morphological approach for autonomous and adaptive systems based on self-reconfigurable modular agents

Abstract

This paper describes a novel approach for managing self-organizing, distributed modular components in dynamically changing environments. The main concept is to fabricate a system which is composed of dynamically associated modular agents, that can migrate and reorganize by itself while the system is being executed. Association between modular agents can be varied and transmuted according to components' own migration schemes including deployment based on biological processes. This paper presents a self-organizable architecture, which can reorganize and reconfigure a system based on modular agents. It is contrived through observation of biological phenomena, and implements a platform to host the architecture in dynamically changing environments. We draw several key features of the modular agents, describe the principles of the modular agent based self-organizable framework, and depict how the proposed framework satisfies the functional requirements of network applications, which are made of several agents. We also demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the framework through examining some simulation results. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.