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3rd Int'l Workshop on Self-Improving System Integration
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SISSY 2016
Workshop on Self-Improving System Integration
July 19th, 2016, Würzburg, Germany
http://www.informatik.uni-augsburg.de/lehrstuehle
/oc/Veranstaltungen/SISSY16/

Affiliated to ICAC 2016
13th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing

Submission Deadline: April 15th, 2016 (extended)
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Call for Papers
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Information and communication technology (ICT) pervades every aspect of our daily lives. This inclusion changes our communities and all of our human interactions. It also presents a significant set of challenges in correctly designing and integrating our resulting technical systems.
For instance, the embedding of ICT functionality in more and more devices (such as household appliances or thermostats) leads to novel interconnections and a changing structure of the overall system. Not only technical systems are increasingly coupled, a variety of previously isolated natural and human systems have consolidated into a kind of overall system of systems – an interwoven system structure.

This change of structure is fundamental and affects the whole production cycle of technical systems – standard system integration and testing is not feasible any more. The increasingly complex challenges of developing the right type of modelling, analysis, and infrastructure for designing and maintaining ICT infrastructures has continued to motivate the self- organising, autonomic and organic computing systems community.

In this workshop, we intend to study novel approaches to system of system integration and testing by applying self-* principles; specifically we want approaches that allow for a continual process of self-integration among components and systems that is self-improving and evolving over time towards an optimised and stable solution.

Although research in self-organising systems – such as the Organic Computing (OC) and Autonomic Computing (AC) initiatives – has seen an exciting decade of development, in which there has been considerable success in building individual systems, OC/AC is faced with the difficult challenge of integrating multiple self-organising systems, and integrating self-organising systems with traditionally engineered ones as well as naturally occurring human organisations. Meanwhile, although there has been important development in system of systems methodologies (e.g., Service-oriented Architectures, clouds technology etc.), many of these developments lack scalable methods for rapidly proving that new configurations of components/subsystems are correctly used or their changes verified or that these frameworks have pulled together the best possible context-sensitive configuration of resources for a user or another system.

The SISSY workshop continues the successful predecessors held at the Eight IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organising Systems (SASO14) in London, UK 2014 and 12th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC15) in Grenobles, France 2015. The workshop intends to focus on the important work of applying self-* principles to the integration of “Interwoven Systems" (where an "Interwoven System" is a system cutting across several technical domains, combining traditionally engineered systems, systems making use of self-X properties and methods, and human systems). The goal of the workshop is to identify key challenges involved in creating self-integrating systems and consider methods to achieve continuous self-improvement for this integration process. The workshop specifically targets an interdisciplinary community of researchers (i.e. from systems engineering, complex adaptive systems, socio-technical systems, and the OC/AC domains) in the hope that collective expertise from a range of domains can be leveraged to drive forward research in the area.


Topics
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The overall message of the workshop covers different fields of research that will be part of the scope for accepted papers and discussions:

* Properties that an OC/AC-based system integration could enable
* Self-x properties applied to systems integration
- self-improving
- self-monitoring
- self-modelling
* Methods for self-integration
- continuous and evolving integration
- self-improving over time
- guidance by models
- collaboration schemes
* Approaches for self-modelling at runtime
* Quantification of the system integration’s quality and performance
* System integration with uncertainty
* Self-Reflection of System Elements
* Implications on traditional design processes
* Implications of the OC design notion on today‘s perception of design
flows and tools
- Trade-off between bottom-up design and pre-fabrication
- Overhead in form of redundant system resources
- Provisioning to allow for self-organised functional enhancement
- Provisioning to allow for performance enhancement at runtime

Further topics connected to the overall message will be also accepted.

Audience
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This workshop intends to bring together two currently separate lines of research and development, Organic Computing/Autonomic System development (OC/AS) and Complex systems/system of systems design and development (SoS), to the mutual benefit of both fields. Recent activities in the Organic Computing area not only showed that OC applications have already crossed over from single systems to interwoven systems (with examples of such drawn from power systems, public transportation systems, medical systems etc.) but also gave the group several new ideas on what new properties an OC/AS system integration could enable. Similarly, recent activities in CSDM showed that the system engineering community has great interest in adopting ideas on self-awareness and self-organization from the OC/AS community.


Important Dates
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* Paper Submission Deadline: April 15, 2016 (extended deadline)
* Paper Acceptance Notification: April 22, 2016
* Camera-Ready Papers due: May 1, 2016
* Workshops date: July 19, 2016


Paper Submission
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The workshop organisers solicit both original research papers as well as position papers and papers of a controversial or visionary nature on the topics outlined in the Call for Papers. Each paper will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the programme committee. The decision will be based on the motivation of the research, the clarity of the claims of the contribution, the relevance of the research to the domain of self- organising systems, its evaluation, and the thoroughness of the related work comparison. Submitted papers must not have been previously published or submitted elsewhere.

The proceedings of all ICAC workshops will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press and made available as a part of the IEEE digital library. In addition, papers will be part of the conference proceedings with ISBN number. Indexing by IEEE explore and DBLP is expected.

Submissions should not exceed 6 pages and formatted according to the IEEE Computer Society Press proceedings style guide and submitted electronically in pdf format. Please submit your papers using the conference management system:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sissy16

The conference management system is also linked on the website. One of the authors has to register for the conference and workshop.


Workshop Organisation
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Kirstie Bellman
Topcy House Consulting
Kirstie.L.Bellman@aero.org

Sven Tomforde
Universität Augsburg, Organic Computing Group
sven.tomforde@informatik.uni-augsburg.de

Rolf P. Würtz
Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Institute for Neural Computation
rolf.wuertz@ini.rub.de

Please contact Sven Tomforde for all enquiries.


Program Committee
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Jacob Beal (BBN Technologies)
Jean Botev (Universität Luxembourg)
Uwe Brinkschulte (Universität Frankfurt am Main)
Kurt Geihs (University of Kassel)
Martin Hoffmann (FH Bielefeld)
Jan Kantert (Leibniz Universität Hannover)
Chris Landauer (The Aerospace Corporation)
Erik Maehle (Universität zu Lübeck)
Sebastian von Mammen (Universität Augsburg)
Bivas Mitra (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur)
Sanaz Mostaghim (University of Magdeburg)
Gero Mühl (Universität Rostock)
Christian Müller-Schloer (Leibniz Universität Hannover)
Stefan Rudolph (Universität Augsburg)
Gregor Schiele (DERI)
Bernhard Sick (Universität Kassel)
Matthias Tichy (Chalmer University Gothenburg)
Arno Wacker (Universität Kassel)
Torben Weis (Universität Duisburg-Essen)
Stefan Wildermann (Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)