Abstract :
Swarm intelligence
(SI) is the collective behaviour of decentralized, self- organized systems, natural
or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression
was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular
robotic systems.
SI systems are typically made up
of a population
of simple agents or boids interacting locally with one another and
with their environment. The agents follow very simple rules, and
although there is
no centralized control
structure dictating how individual
agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent"
global behavior, unknown to the individual agents. Natural examples of SI include
ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth,
and fish schooling.
The application
of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics, while
'swarm intelligence'
refers to the more general set of algorithms. 'Swarm prediction' has been used in
the context of forecasting problems.
Applications
Swarm Intelligence-based techniques can be used in a number of applications. The U.S. military is investigating swarm techniques for controlling unmanned vehicles. The European Space Agency is thinking about an orbital swarm for self assembly and interferometry. NASA is investigating the use of swarm technology for planetary mapping. A 1992 paper by M. Anthony Lewis and George A. Bekey discusses the possibility of using swarm intelligence to control nanobots within the body for the purpose of killing cancer tumors.
Crowd simulation
Artists are
using swarm technology as a means of creating complex interactive systems or simulating crowds. Stanley and Stella
in: Breaking the Ice was the first movie to make use of swarm technology
for rendering, realistically depicting the movements of groups of fish and birds
using the Boids system. Tim Burton's
Batman Returns also made use
of swarm technology for showing the movements of a group of bats. The Lord of the Rings film trilogy made
use of similar technology, known as Massive, during
battle scenes. Swarm technology is particularly attractive because it is cheap,
robust, and simple.
Airlines have
used swarm theory to simulate passengers boarding a plane. Southwest Airlines
researcher Douglas A. Lawson
used an ant-based
computer simulation employing only six interaction
rules to evaluate boarding times using various boarding methods.(Miller, 2010, xii-xviii).
Advantages of
SI
The systems
are scalable because the same control architecture can be applied to a couple of
agents or thousands of agents.
The systems
are flexible because agents can be easily added or removed without influencing the
structure.
The systems
are robust because agents are simple in design, the reliance on individual agents is small, and
failure of a single agents has little impact on the
system’s performance.
The systems
are able to adapt to new situations easily.
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