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A primary motivation for our research in digital ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…

Computing systems are omnipresent; their sustainability has become crucial for our society. A key aspect of this sustainability is the ability of computing systems to cope with the continuous change they face, ranging from dynamic operating…

In the natural world, life has found innumerable ways to survive and often thrive. Between and even within species, each individual is in some manner unique, and this diversity lends adaptability and robustness to life. In this work, we aim…

Soft stretchable materials are key for arising technologies such as stretchable electronics or batteries, smart textiles, biomedical devices, tissue engineering and soft robotics. Recent attempts to design such materials, via e.g.…

Several abilities of biological systems, such as adaptation to natural environment, or of animals to learn patterns when appropriately trained, are features that are extremely useful, if emulated by electronic circuits, in applications…

The gradual accumulation of damage and dysregulation during the aging of living organisms can be quantified. Even so, the aging process is complex and has multiple interacting physiological scales -- from the molecular to cellular to whole…

Biological systems exhibit two structural features on many levels of organization: sparseness, in which only a small fraction of possible interactions between components actually occur; and modularity - the near decomposability of the…

Robustness of spatial pattern against perturbations is an indispensable property of developmental processes for organisms, which need to adapt to changing environments. Although specific mechanisms for this robustness have been extensively…

Synthetic biologists have made great progress over the past decade in developing methods for modular assembly of genetic sequences and in engineering biological systems with a wide variety of functions in various contexts and organisms.…

Many biological systems collectively construct complex, adaptive, and functional architectures, where function emerges from bottom-up building processes rather than top-down planning or centralized control. However, general strategies for…

The paper is concerned with examining the effects that design-for-demise solutions can have not only on the demisability of components, but also on their survivability that is their capability to withstand impacts from space debris. First…

Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…

There has recently been an explosion of interest in how "higher-order" structures emerge in complex systems. This "emergent" organization has been found in a variety of natural and artificial systems, although at present the field lacks a…

Plasticity-led evolution is a form of evolution where a change in the environment induces novel traits via phenotypic plasticity, after which the novel traits are genetically accommodated over generations under the novel environment. This…

A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. However, the role played by the environment in influencing the…

Computing systems form the backbone of many aspects of our life, hence they are becoming as vital as water, electricity, and road infrastructures for our society. Yet, engineering long running computing systems that achieve their goals in…

Collective adaptive systems are an emerging class of networked computational systems, particularly suited in application domains such as smart cities, complex sensor networks, and the Internet of Things. These systems tend to feature large…

Lots of bio-inspired research works have been conducted in self-adaptive software. They have focused on the external behavior of biological entities without their genetic material that causes this behavior and constitutes the challenge this…

Components in many real-world complex systems depend on each other for the resources required for survival, and may die of a shortage. These patterns of dependencies often take the form of a complex network whose structure potentially…

Organisms result from adaptive processes interacting across different time scales. One such interaction is that between development and evolution. Models have shown that development sweeps over several traits in a single agent, sometimes…