Mobile Intelligence

6.5 SWARMING INTELLIGENCE

Agents provide software designers and developers with a metaphorical way of structuring an application around autonomous, communicative components, and lead to the construction of software tools and infrastructure. In this sense, they offer a new and often more appropriate route to the development of complex computational systems, especially in open and dynamic environment. One interesting example is the natural coupling of software agents and swarm intelligence, which simply put, is the emergent collective intelligence of groups of simple autonomous agents.

The expression “swarm intelligence” was coined by Beni and Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems [50]. It is an artificial intelligence technique that studies collective behavior in decentralized, self-organized environments. Swarm intelligence systems are often inspired by social animals in nature: a group of ants forages for food; a colony of termite builds incredibly complex nests; a flock of birds migrates from one location to another; a school of fish swims, forages, and flees together, and so on. In these biological systems, each individual is a simple agent and there is normally no centralized control dictating how each individual agent should behave. Surprisingly, the simple local interactions among agents and the interactions between an agent and its surrounding environment often lead to the emergence of complex and goal-oriented global behavior.

An abstract view of a swarm ...