Perspectives on Initial Ideas and Conceptual Components of Autonomous Cooperation and Control

Abstract

In order to enable the implementation of self-organisation ideas for logistics — concretised as control and organisation principles —, one has to understand the fundamental basics and characteristics of autonomous cooperation and control as well as its foundations. In this respect, the basic underlying idea is the concept of self-organisation like shown above. It is an interdisciplinary concept that has been developing for more than 35 years under labels such as self-organisation, autopoiesis, dissipative structures as well as emergency and complexity theory. The core of the self-organisation concept is the formation and development of order in complex dynamic systems (Paslack 1991). In natural sciences, important exponents are Prigogine (Glansdorff and Prigogine 1971) in chemistry (theory of dissipative structures), Peitgen and Richter (Peitgen and Richter 1986) in mathematics (chaos theory), Haken (Haken and Graham 1971, Haken 1973) and Foerster (Foerster 1960) in physics (synergetics and cybernetics), and Maturana and Varela(Maturana 1973) in biology (autopoiesis). Those ideas still exert a great influence on other disciplines working on questions of self-order creation. The last concept “autopoiesis” is for example applied to other fields such as sociology Luhmann’s system theory (Luhmann 1973).