Making self-organisation a way of life

Socio-technical aspects of life, that, is applying real-life phenomena to a technical system and vice versa, can give food for thought. Self-organisation is a natural phenomenon which means that there are some intelligent agents or persons or animals who can make a formation just by performing their tasks properly with the cooperation of the immediate neighbors. For example, a flock of birds, a swarm of fishes etc.

Birds fly together forming a particular pattern. If some birds are missing from that group, they reform the pattern. This is a self-correcting feature which provides an antidote for failure. Fish too make some beautiful patterns.

As human beings, we can also give a simple example of our self-organised formation. For example, if we stand for prayer in the mosque, we also need to make a straight line formation, horizontally.

This is a pattern and we make a self-organised network at that time. We just try to make the line straight and look what the immediate neighbors are doing. For the self-organised network, there should be an overall goal and all the intelligent agents (persons, animals, programmable devices etc.) involved with that need to do a set of actions which will be helpful to satisfy that goal.

The concept of self-organisation is now widely used in technical aspects, e.g., wireless sensor networks, device to device communications, cellular networks etc. Many researchers are doing research on that and completing their PhDs as well. With the self-organisation features, the network can be robust.

But it may happen that some agents can mislead with the wrong information. At that time we need to identify that faulty agent by a consensus algorithm, which is also widely applied in distributed network systems.

If we can think of these features in our real life having a desire to fulfill a noble cause, we can set some fruitful tasks for us to do and strictly follow those. We can cooperate with the neighbors to get useful information and can perform the task correctly.

Yes, there is a chance that some persons will not be cooperative. In that case, we can identify them by our own consensus mechanism and can remove them from the network.

Can we be self-organised to carry out noble task, to forge a strong bonding and for the betterment of the society?

* Md. Muhidul Islam Khan is a senior lecturer at School of Information Technologies, Tallinn University of Technology, in Estonia