Emergent engineering: design of evolvable architectures for large scale enetworked systems

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How to craft the nervous system of our eNetworked world to enable seamless evolution through challenging times and adaptation not only to meet the unexpected and survive it, but thrive on it? Recognizing the fundamental limitations of engineering in dealing with highly complex systems, we frontally approach the radical shift of paradigm, brought by the ubiquity of computing and communication environments that link systems and people in unprecedented ways via eNetworks. One major characteristic of these new technological developments, termed here Cyber-Physical Ecosystems (CPE) - is that, given their very nature, they cannot be a-priori defined - but rather emerge from the interactions between individual components, interactions facilitated by the eNetworks. This challenges the traditional mainstream engineering school of thought in its very core in disruptive ways. In essence, the traditional active role of the designer in crafting the organizational, systems and software blueprint 'with the end in mind', namely by a-priory defining the system and its performance requirements following a hierarchical, 'top-down' linear thinking is being fundamentally challenged by the emergent behavior of eNetworked CPE which demand the designer to rather take the passive role of observer in the process of 'self-design' by which the system emerges its organizational structure resulted from the interactions between a myriad of elementary components. We aim to unravel an 'eNetwork DNA' and put it to work similarly to how DNA molds the fundamental cells in natural systems such that they can evolve to accommodate gradual or abrupt change in the environment or internal operating conditions. The aimed at new science of emergent engineering opens the perspective towards a wide range of applications critical today, including: disaster response through deployment of holistic security ecosystems, green electricity generation and distribution, pandemic mitigation, networked transportation and manufacturing, environmental monitoring and sustainability assessment.