Computing within materials: Self-adaptive materials and self-organizing agents

Materials Informatics addresses commonly the design of new materials using advanced algorithms and methods from computer science like Machine Learning and Data Mining. Ongoing miniaturization of computers down to the micro-scale-level enables the integration of computing in structures and materials that can be understand as Materials Informatics from another point of view. There are two major application classes: Smart Sensorial Materials and Smart Adaptive Materials. The latter class is considered in this work by combining self-organizing and adaptive Multi-agent Systems with materials posing changeable material properties like stiffness by actuators. It is assumed that the computational part of this micro-scale Cyber-Physical-System is entirely integrated in the material or structure as a distributed computer composed of a network of low-resource computers. Each node is connected to sensors and actuators. Actually only macroscopic systems can be realized. Therefore a multi-domain simulation combining computational and physical simulation is used to demonstrate the approach and to evaluate self-adaptive algorithms.