Semantic multi-criteria decision making in autonomous embedded systems

The increasing complexity of modern computer systems emerges as a real challenge for both the users and the designers. According to the innovative vision of Organic Computing systems, the system components will profit from their autonomy to perform a self-organization, and subsequently, to reach a high degree of adaptivity. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the vision of Organic Computing and its realization in embedded computer systems. An interdisciplinary methodology called " Semantic Multi-Criteria Decision Making " (SeMCDM), has been suggested and evaluated regarding different aspects. The new methodology adopts a marketplace-oriented behavior pattern for the autonomous system components. The shift of the design decisions from the human designer to the autonomous system components implies a balancing knowledge transfer in the same direction. From this central idea two issues emerge: The first issue addresses the form of the knowledge to be transferred, while the second issue deals with the appropriate mechanisms for autonomous decision making. Similar to the Semantic Web, the necessity for a common, machine processable, understanding of the world has been recognized. An ontology-based description of the world offers an optimal solution to represent the knowledge of several human designers, to transfer the knowledge to the autonomous system components, and to build a communication language between the autonomous system components. While processing the ontological knowledge, the autonomous units share also the same semantic with the human designers and users. This thesis defines the autonomous decision making as a selection problem, which is strongly affected by the existence of multiple, conflicting, criteria. Methods for making decision under multiple criteria, which are known from the research field of " Operations Research " , have been categorized and analyzed to proof their adequacy for the purposes of autonomous system components. In the light of the adopted MCDM-Methods, development tools have been designed and actually embedded within an ontology development environment. A specially developed MCDM-ontology builds a bridge between two worlds: Ontologies and MCDM. A set of inference rules enhances a conventional inference engine to be a MCDM-capable inference engine. Through the merge of both technologies, this thesis presents not only a new concept of Semantic Multi-Criteria Decision Making SeMCDM, but also a complete platform for the design and deployment of autonomous system components in self-organizing systems. The investigation of current automotive communication systems, together with the creation of a catalog of requirements, targets at the identification of possible applications …