In a narrow, and formal, sense we talk about the research group residing in the Department of Computer Control, Tallinn University of Technology. In real life most of the research results have been obtained within an extended, and informal, research group. Since Estonian research landscape is strictly institutionalised and informal inter-institutional research groups do not fit comfortably into the mental world of Estonian research financing bodies, we face every now and then problems due to our informal nature as the inter-institutional research group.

The extended research group comprises people from:
• Research Laboratory on Proactive Technologies, Department of Computer Control, Faculty of Information Technology, Tallinn University of Technology (1 professor on Real-time Systems, 4 PhD, 8 PhD students); the laboratory was established in April 2007, before that the researchers were distributed all over the department;
• Laboratory of Situation Aware Systems, Institute of Technology, University of Tartu (1 professor on Proactive Systems, 1PhD, 3 researchers);
• Occasional, but strengthening cooperation with researchers from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Tallinn University of Technology, and with researchers from a SME (IB Krates OŰ). 

For many years our extended research group has studied different aspects of designing, analysing and implementing sample systems that fit into the generic definition of proactive real-time systems. This study has convinced us that the holistic approach required for building multi-agent and real-time systems is not in concordance with the mainstream computer science and software engineering tools and methodologies. The basic practical problem is that the conventional theory and software development tools assume that specification (or design) of the future software system determines all the properties of the future implemented system – leaving no room for emergent behaviour. In the other words, the available conventional theory and tools prohibit (strictly speaking) the emergent behaviour. However, due to numerous (implicit, but frequent) violations of the basic assumptions of algorithm theory, increasing number of computer applications actually exhibit the emergent behaviour – in everyday practice, many cases of the emergent behaviour are either taken care by the exception handling subsystem, or are just neglected