Simulation of Swarm Behaviour

The emergent collective intelligence of groups of simple agents known as swarm intelligence is a new exiting way of achieving a form of artificial intelligence. We are studying a formal model for swarm intelligence inspired by biological swarms found in nature. Software agents are used to model the individuals of a swarm. Each agent is controlled by a neural network that processes position data from the comrades in its visible zone given by a compound eye and in this way allows it to navigate in 3D space. An additional input parameter is used to represent the agent’s motivation to form a swarm. Simulations with different motiviation parameters exhibit remarkable agent formations that can be considered as biologically plausable. Several ways to improve the model are currently discussed.

Key Words: computational intelligence - swarm simulation - multi-agent system - neural network - compound eye.

Literature:

• W. Kramper: Simulation von Schwarmverhalten. PhD thesis, 124 p., mbv, Berlin, 2010.

Common work with Wolfgang Kramper and Ralf Wanker.