Controllable Solutions for Large-scale Systems

 One of the fundamental issues facing any system that grows to a certain size is controllability.

At smaller scales, controllability is usually not a bottleneck and can be managed directly through the operating system nodes. However, as the scale gradually increases, the controllability and complexity will become a key constraint on whether the system can be expanded.

To deal with controllability complexity, there are two basic ideas: decoupled control and spontaneous control.

Decoupled Control

The simplest idea is to separate the control plane from the data plane and management plane of the system. The decoupled control plane can construct a unified interface for operation and reuse control logic.

Taking herd of sheep as an example, it would be very difficult to directly control the progress of each sheep, but it would be much simpler to tie a rope to each sheep (decoupled from the control plane) and walk directly on the rope.

This idea was applied to the Internet system, and the Software Defined Network was born; when it was applied to the cloud-native software system, the Service Mesh was born. The same applies to economic and financial systems.

It should be emphasized that controllability is the ability to manage the system in an orderly manner. Therefore, the management of the control plane can be centralized or distributed.

Spontaneous control

Spontaneous control is the opposite of decoupling control: instead of stripping control, it devolves control, so that components in the system have more self-control capabilities.

Take herd of sheep as an example. If through training, each sheep will automatically follow the lead sheep, then you only need to lead the lead sheep to guide the whole flock.

The idea of ​​spontaneous control was applied to the communication system, and the Internet and Web 2.0 were born; when it was applied to encrypted electronic currency, the Bitcoin was born; when it was applied to the economic system, several Nobel Prizes were born.

This idea is likely to be the basis for large-scale intelligent systems (robot clusters) in the future.

The Future of Control Science

The study of cybernetics of small-scale systems has been very mature in the last century. Many modern systems are large-scale systems, and the research on their control modes is imminent.