Self-Organising Services

This paper discusses the notion of self-organising mechanisms, such as spreading or gossip, provided as services on top of which more complex applications can be built. Their functionality is provided as the result of the interactions among several entities, possibly distributed across several nodes. Self-organising services are either provided as "core'' services by the underlying platform, or as higher level services. A typical example of a "core'' service is the diffusion of a gradient, which is a spatial structure spanning multiple nodes. This paper describes a series of self-organising services, their implementation and a crowd steering case study.