Engineering with Sociological Metaphors: Examples and Prospects

By: David Hales
Date: 15th November 2004
CPM Report No.: CPM-04-148

Presented at the "Engineering with Social Metaphors" day of the AISB Symposium on Socially Inspired Computing,  University of Hertfordship, April 2005.


Abstract

One way of approaching the engineering of systems with desirable properties is to examine naturally occurring systems that appear to have such properties. One line of work examines biological theories and phenomena. Ideas from the social sciences are less well explored as a possible source of so-called ‘self-*’ (self-organisation, self-repair, self-management) engineering techniques. We briefly overview some recent work that follows this latter approach and consider some specific prospects for future work.


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