Beyond swarm intelligence: building self-managing systems based on pollination

Abstract

Nature exhibits a fruitful inspiration source for building self-managing systems. The human body's autonomous nervous system, its reflex and healing system, or its immune system inspired the building of self-managing systems in the same way as biological systems as ant, termite, or bee colonies. Thereby, self-managing systems based on such biological, self-organizing systems mostly rely on Swarm Intelligence (SI). However, as there exist management problems to that swarm-intelligent, selfmanaging solutions are hard to apply, novel biological paradigms have to be studied, which are also self-organizing but do not rely on SI in order to achieve selfmanagement. This paper describes such a novel paradigm, pollination of flowers, and demonstrates exemplary how to build self-managing systems based on this paradigm.