Creating Decentralized, Autonomous Systems by Embryomorphic Engineering

Exploding growth in computational systems forces us to gradually replace rigid design and control with decentralization and autonomy. Information technologies will progress, instead, by“meta-designing” mechanisms of system selfassembly, self-regulation and evolution. Nature offers a great variety of efficient complex systems, in which numerous small elements form large-scale, adaptive patterns. The new engineering challenge is to recreate this self-organization and let it freely generate innovative designs under guidance. This article presents an original model of artificial system growth inspired by embryogenesis. A virtual organism is a lattice of cells that proliferate, migrate and self-pattern into differentiated domains. Each cell’s fate is controlled by an internal gene regulatory network. Embryomorphic engineering emphasizes hyperdistributed architectures, and their development as a prerequisite of evolutionary design.