Book excerpt: This book describes the emerging field of self-organizing, multicore, distributed and real-time embedded systems. Self ‐organization of both hardware and software can be a key technique to handle the growing complexity of modern computing systems. Distributed systems running hundreds of tasks on dozens of processors, each equipped with multiple cores, requires self‐organization principles to ensure efficient and reliable operation. This book addresses various, so-called Self‐X features such as self-configuration, self‐optimization, self‐adaptation, self‐healing and self‐protection.