Within the framework of the Franco-German school doctoral, the purpose of the winter school (WS) 2006 between the Universities of Lorraine, Metz and Nancy, and the University of Kaiserslautern is to bring researchers and students from the involved universities together in order to present their work in self-organizing systems and allow some exchange between the PhD students and different researchers involved or not in the German- French University.

The school is part of the annual program between the involved universities in their effort to enforce a continuous exchange of students and researchers from both sides, a common organization of workshops and the participation in common projects in order to improve the quality of teaching and research in the involved universities and to provide to students the benefits of experiencing the cultural and technical differences offered by the two countries.

The topic of research is the investigation of Self-Organization with the focus on embedded systems. Increasing complexity, due to rapid progress in information technology, makes systems more and more difficult to integrate and to control. Due to the large amount of possible configurations and alternative design decisions, the integration of components from different manufacturers into a working distributed and connected system at compile time is often impossible. Systems must be designed to cope with unexpected run-time environmental changes and interactions. They must be able to organize themselves and to adapt to change in order to optimally process the load we put on them while avoiding fatal behavior.

The design of self-organizing embedded systems cannot be done only with the traditional design methods anymore. Self-organization (selfconfiguration, self-optimization, self-healing and self-protecting) must be considered to some extent.

Self-organization can be seen as a process in which patterns at the global level of a system emerge solely from numerous interactions among the lower-level components of the system. Moreover, the rules specifying interactions among the system's components are executed using only local information, without reference to the global pattern.

Natural systems have evolved to deal with dynamism, unpredictability, uncertainty and lack of guarantees. Several initiatives (Autonomic Computing, Swarm Intelligence, Organic Computing) were founded with the goal of designing and building highly reliable and robust systems by copying the properties of natural systems. However, substantial efforts and competencies from different fields are required in order to make the dream of autonomic and organic computing come true.

We are interest in having researchers from different fields, ranging from algorithmic and architecture of computing systems, to pattern recognition and robotics, interacting with students in order to provide a broad knowledge and a strong basis required in designing and implementing self-organization in distributed embedded systems. The variety of researchers from different fields on both sides also provides a great complementary basis needed to reach the common goal.

The different topics of interest are, but not limited to:

• System Architecture
• System Design
• Computing Platforms
• Investigation of autonomic properties
• Case Studies and Test beds

Each participant willing to give a talk must provide a title and a abstract no longer than half page. The abstracts collection will be generated and published for the event.