Abstract
Greater understanding of biology in modern times has enabled significant breakthroughs in improving healthcare, quality of life, and eliminating many diseases and congenital illnesses. Simultaneously there is a move towards emulating nature and copying many of the wonders uncovered in biology, resulting in “biologically inspired” systems. Significant results have been reported in a wide range of areas, with systems inspired by nature enabling exploration, communication, and advances that were never dreamed possible just a few years ago. We warn, that as in many other fields of endeavor, we should be inspired by nature and biology, not engage in mimicry. We describe some results of biological inspiration that augur promise in terms of improving the safety and security of systems, and in developing self-managing systems, that we hope will ultimately lead to self-governing systems.
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Notes
- 1.
The earliest recorded quotation is from a press conference, quoted by James D. Newton in Uncommon Friends (1929): “None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”
- 2.
The term “swarm”, as we use it here, refers to a (possibly large) grouping of simple components collaborating to achieve some goal and produce significant results. The term should not be taken to imply that these components fly (or are airborne); they may equally well be on the surface of the Earth, under the surface, under water, or indeed operating on other planets.
- 3.
Not all species of bee swarm; there are several solitary species.
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Acknowledgements
The chapter is based on a keynote talk given at the IFIP Conference on Biologically Inspired Cooperative Computing (BICC 2006) at 19th IFIP WCC 2006, Santiago, Chile, August 2006
First published as: Hinchey, M.G., Sterritt, R., 2006, in IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 216, Biologically Inspired Cooperative Computing, eds. Pan, Y., Rammig, F., Schmeck, H., Solar, M. (Boston: Springer), pp. 7–20. Reprinted with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media.
We are grateful to the organizers of BICC 2006 for inviting this talk and associated paper.
Autonomic apoptosis was introduced in [22], and quiescence in [26]. More detailed expositions of the ANTS concept mission, and specifically the PAM submission, are given in [17, 27, 28].
Part of this work has been supported by the NASA Office of Systems and Mission Assurance (OSMA) through its Software Assurance Research Program (SARP) project, Formal Approaches to Swarm Technologies (FAST), and by NASA Software Engineering Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center (Code 581).
This research is partly supported at University of Ulster by the Computer Science Research Institute (CSRI) and the Centre for Software Process Technologies (CSPT) which is funded by Invest NI through the Centres of Excellence Programme, under the EU Peace II initiative.
Some of the technologies described in this chapter are patented or patent-pending and assigned to the United States government.
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Hinchey, M., Sterritt, R. (2012). 99% (Biological) Inspiration…. In: Hinchey, M., Coyle, L. (eds) Conquering Complexity. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2297-5_8
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