A generalisable measure of self-organisation and emergence

Abstract

In adaptive systems that involve large numbers of entities, emergent, global behaviours that arise from localised interactions are a critical concept. Understanding and shaping emergence may be essential to such systems’success. To aid in this understanding, this paper introduces a measure gleaned from non-linear systems theory. The paper discusses how this measure can be used in reinforcing self organising behaviours in adaptive systems. Further, it is shown that the measure can be successfully employed as feedback to a system employing evolutionary computation (EC) and using this to design in desired self organising behaviours in an approximation to a biological plausible collective system.