Lecture 10: Swarm Intelligence and Particle Swarm Optimisation

NOT COVERED IN THE EXAM

What is Swarm Intelligence?

Swarm Intelligence: Collective behaviour of decentralised self-organised natural or artificial systems

• Self organising system:
  • An initially disordered system, but global phenomina such as order or coordination will arise out of local interactions between its components

A swarm intelligence system typically consists of simple agents interacting with each other and their environment following simple rules

Why have they developed?

There is no clear explanation for the evolution of swarm behaviour. Some possible explanations include:

• Better defence, early warning or confusing a predator
• Better foraging efficiency
• Saving energy, birds flying in formation often see reduced energy usage

What is Swarm Intelligence in CS?

In Computer Science we define Swarm Intelligence as a Multi-agent system that has self-organised behaviour that shows some intelligent behaviour

There are two main fields of research:

1. Swarm iIntelligence algorithms

   • Ant colony optimisation: An algorithm inspired by ants' collective behaviour, useful for combinatorial optimisation problems such as path finding.
   • Particle swarm Optimisation

2. Swarm Robotics: design coordination of multi-robot systems which consist of large numbers of mostly simple robots.

   • Goes beyond distributed systems, aims to promote scalability