Enhancing Reliability in Organic Computing Using Hormone Guard

The bio-inspired concept of Organic Computing applies biological concepts to technical systems. Organic Computing utilizes an Artificial Hormone System (AHS) as a decentralized mechanism, i.e., a middleware that continuously monitors and organizes task allocations to computing nodes in distributed real-time embedded systems. By introducing different types of artificial hormones for the tasks, such as favoring and constraining hormones, appropriate task assignments are continuously realized by maintaining hormone balances through distributed closed-loop control. This process handles the increasing complexity of e.g., distributed control systems by enabling self-configuration, -adaptation, -improvement and -healing. However, faults in the artificial hormone system, for instance due to incorrect hormone values, can result in adverse and critical system behavior and even complete system failure. Therefore, this paper presents a fault recovery solution, namely the so-called hormone guard. The hormone guard plays a pivotal role within the AHS, serving as a safeguard to ensure that computation nodes do not receive incorrect hormone values. This paper presents the concept and implementation of the hormone guard and evaluates its performance and contribution to the overall system stability and reliability.