ESOS

The engineering of self-organizing systems (ESOS) is a contradiction in itself: how can you organize something which organizes itself? If we want to build a self-organizing system with autonomous agents, then how can we ensure the function ? Agents do by defintion what they want. How can you construct a self-organizing system?

The answer is: in a balanced, iterative process which combines top-down analysis with bottom-up simulation, where we step by step define the 'rules of the game'. The bottom-up process is needed ensure diversity (innovative, random, surprising elements). The top-down process ensure unity (e.g. function, quality and goal-orientation). Together they form a cyclic round-trip process, which can be named synthetic microanalysis. This is nothing else but the scientific method applied to engineering. Remarkably, some computer scientists do not want to hear this. They are of course scientists, and as scientists they use of course the scientific method. How do we dare to question this? Yet there is a difference between the scientist and the engineer:

The scientist seeks to understand what is,
the engineer seeks to create what never was.
The engineer explores in order to build, 
the scientist builds in order to explore.

The best are "theory engineers" or "scientific engineers": scientists who construct new theories, or engineers who discover new laws in engineering, and new ways to build new types of systems. Albert Einstein comes to mind.