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Introduction
BISON is a three-year Shared-Cost RTD Project
(IST-2001-38923) funded by the Future & Emerging
Technologies initiative of the Information Society Technologies
Programme of the European Commission. The project runs from
January 2003 until April 2006.
The complexity of modern Network Information Systems (NIS)
has reached a level that puts them beyond our ability to deploy,
manage and keep functioning correctly through traditional
techniques. Part of the problem is due to the sheer size that
these systems may reach with millions of users and millions of
interconnected devices. The other aspect of the problem is due
to the extremely complex interactions that may result among
components even when their numbers are modest. Our current
understanding of these systems is such that minor perturbations
in some remote corner of the system will often have unforeseen,
and at times catastrophic, global repercussions. In addition to
being fragile, many situations arising from the highly dynamic
environment in which they are deployed require manual
intervention to keep NIS functioning.
What is required is a paradigm shift in confronting the
complexity explosion problem to enable building robust NIS that
are self-organizing and self-repairing. BISON draws
inspiration from biological processes and mechanisms to develop techniques and
tools for building robust, self-organizing and adaptive
NIS as ensembles of autonomous agents.
What renders this approach
particularly attractive from a dynamic network perspective is
that global properties like adaptation, self-organization and
robustness are achieved without explicitly programming them into
the individual artificial agents. Yet, given large ensembles
of agents, the global behavior is surprisingly adaptive
and can cope with arbitrary initial conditions, unforeseen
scenarios, variations in the environment or presence of deviant
agents. This represents a radical shift from traditional
algorithmic techniques to that of obtaining the desired system
properties as a result of emergent behavior that often involves
evolution, adaptation, or learning.
Goals
BISON explores the use of ideas derived from complex
adaptive systems (CAS) to enable the construction of robust and
self-organizing information systems for deployment in highly
dynamic network environments. We cast solutions to
important problems arising in
overlay networks and
mobile ad-hoc networks
as desirable global properties that systems
should exhibit. We then search for CAS which can bring about these global
properties.
A longer-term goal of BISON is to
systematize this process --- to develop a
coherent set of heuristics that can guide the search for CAS
giving a desired global behavior.
BISON in the news
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