"Organic computing is computing that behaves and interacts with humans in an organic manner. The term "organic" is used to describe the system's behavior, and does not imply that they are constructed from organic materials. It is based on the insight that we will soon be surrounded by large collections of autonomous systems, which are equipped with sensors and actuators, aware of their environment, communicate freely, and organize themselves in order to perform the actions and services that seem to be required.

The goal is to construct such systems as robust, safe, flexible, and trustworthy as possible. In particular, a strong orientation towards human needs as opposed to a pure implementation of the technologically possible seems absolutely central. In order to achieve these goals, our technical systems will have to act more independently, flexibly, and autonomously, i.e. they will have to exhibit lifelike properties. We call such systems "organic". Hence, an "Organic Computing System" is a technical system which adapts dynamically to exogenous and endogenous change. It is characterized by the properties of self-organization, self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, self-protection, self-explaining, and context awareness. It can be seen as an extension of the Autonomic computing vision of IBM. "

Source: ‘Organic computing’, Wikipedia. 06-Mar-2018 [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Organic_computing&oldid=829050508. [Accessed: 07-Jun-2019]

The organic computing seminar deals with selected and specific topics from Organic Computing, such as:

  • Introduction and application of Organic Computing
  • System theory and robotics
  • Distributed intelligent software agents
  • Knowledge-based and decision making systems
  • Event processing
  • Machine learning (e. g. reinforcement learning)
  • Classifier systems, genetic algorithms as well as ant algorithms