Modeling Distributed Search via Social Insects

Complex group behavior arises in social insects colonies as the integration of the actions of simple and redundant individual insects [Adler and Gordon, 1992, Oster and Wilson, 1978]. Furthermore, the colony can act as an information center to expedite foraging [Brown, 1989]. We apply these lessons from natural systems to model collective action and memory in a computational agent society. Collective action can expedite search in combinatorial optimization problems [Dorigo et al., 1996]. Collective memory can improve learning in multi-agent systems [Garland and Alterman, 1996]. Our collective adaptation integrates the simplicity of collective action with the pattern detection of collective memory to significantly improve both the gathering and processing of knowledge. As a test of the role of the society as an information center, we examine the ability of the society to distribute task allocation without any omnipotent centralized control. Introduction A popular misconception of inte..