Swarm Intelligence

Gaurav Agrawal Phd scholar (computer science) Sharda University

OUTLINE


Background

What is a Swarm Intelligence (SI)? Examples from nature Origins and Inspirations of SI
  

Ant Colony Optimization Particle Swarm Optimization Properties of a Swarm Intelligence System

 

ADVANTAGES OF SI SI APPLICATIONS

swarm behavior


The behaviors of a flock of birds, a group of ants, a school of fish, etc.,were the field of study during earlier days. Such collective motion of insects and birds is known to as swarm behavior.

WHAT IS A SWARM?


A loosely structured collection of interacting agents

Agents:  Individuals that belong to a group (but are not necessarily identical)  They contribute to and benefit from the group  They can recognize, communicate, and/or interact with each other


A swarm is better understood if thought of as agents exhibiting a collective behavior A type of self-organization emerges from the collection of actions of the group.

SWARM INTELLIGENCE (SI)

 

Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang introduced the term swarm intelligence in a 1989. Swarm intelligence is the collective intelligence of groups of simple autonomous agents. The autonomous agent is a subsystem that interacts with its environment, relatively independently from all other agents. There is no global plan or leader to control the entire group of autonomous agents. Based on group behavior found in nature

Swarm intelligence techniques are population based stochastic methods used in combinatorial optimization problems in which the collective behavior of relatively simple individuals arises from their local interactions with their environment to produce functional global patterns.

EXAMPLES OF SWARMS IN NATURE:

 

Classic Example: Swarm of Bees Can be extended to other similar systems:

Ant colony  Agents: ants Flock of birds  Agents: birds Traffic  Agents: cars Crowd  Agents: humans Immune system  Agents: cells and molecules

Boid model
In 1987, a boid = Bird-oids (bird like) model was created by Reynold. This boid is a distributed behavioral model, which is used to simulate the motion of a flock of birds on a personal computer. Each boid serves as an independent actor that navigates based on its own perception of the dynamic environment. There are a certain set of rules that are to be observed by the boid. The avoidance rule states that an individual boid must move away from boids that are too close, so as to reduce the chance of in-air collisions.

The copy rule states that a boid must fly in the general direction along with the flock by considering the other boids average velocities and directions.

The center rule states that a boid should minimize exposure to the flocks exterior by moving toward the perceived center of the flock.

TWO COMMON SI ALGORITHMS

 

Ant Colony Optimization Particle Swarm Optimization

PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION (PSO)

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) was proposed by James Kennedy and R. C. Eberhart in 1995, inspired by social behavior of organisms such as bird flocking and fish schooling. The underlying concept is that, for every time instant, the velocity of each particle also known as the potential solution, changes between its pbest and lbest locations. The particle associated with the best solution (fitness value) seems to be the leader and each particle keeps track of its coordinates in the problem space. This fitness value is stored which is referred to as pbest. Another best value that is tracked by the particle swarm optimizer is the best value, obtained so far by any particle in the neighbors of the particle. This location is called lbest.

 

when a particle takes all the population as its topological neighbors, the best value is a global best and is called gbest.

Thus a PSO system combines local search methods with global search methods

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)



Is a class of algorithms, whose first member, called Ant System, was initially proposed by Colorni, Dorigo and Maniezzo 1992. In nature, ants usually wander randomly, and upon finding food return to their nest while laying down pheromone trails. The other ants find the path (pheromone trail), and follow the trail, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food. The pheromone starts to evaporate as time passes. If the time taken for an ant to travel down the path and back again to the nest, the pheromone evaporates thereby making the path less prominent. A shorter path, in comparison will be visited by more ants (can be described as a loop of positive feedback) and thus the pheromone density remains high for a longer time.

An ant runs more or less at random around the colony; 1. On discovering food, it returns more or less directly to the nest, leaving in its path a trail of pheromone; 2.These pheromones are attractive, nearby ants will be inclined to follow, more or less directly, the track 3.Returning to the colony, these ants will strengthen the route; 4. If there are two routes to reach the same food source then, in a given amount of time, the shorter one will be traveled by more ants than the long route; The short route will be increasingly enhanced, and therefore become more attractive; The long route will eventually isappear because pheromones are volatile; Eventually, all the ants have determined and therefore "chosen" the shortest route.

ACO is implemented as a collective group of intelligent agents, which simulate the ants behavior, walking around the graph representing the problem to solve using mechanisms of cooperation and adaptation. ACO algorithm requires the following definitions: The problem needs to be represented appropriately, which would allow the ants to incrementally update the solutions through the use of a probabilistic transition rules, based on the amount of pheromone in the trail and other problem specific knowledge. It is also important to enforce a strategy to construct only valid solutions corresponding to the problem definition A problem-dependent heuristic function that measures the quality of components that can be added to the current partial solution A rule set for pheromone updating, which specifies how to modify the pheromone value . A probabilistic transition rule based on the value of the heuristic function and the pheromone value that is used to iteratively construct a solution

Properties of a Swarm Intelligence System

Unity: A swarm is a combination of several individuals.  Fault tolerance: Swarm intelligent processes do not rely on a centralized control mechanism. Therefore the loss of a few nodes or links does not result in catastrophic failure.  Rule-based behavior: A certain set of rules are observed by the individuals that exploit only local information that the individuals exchange directly or through the environment.  Autonomy: The overall behavior of the swarm system is self organized, it does not depend on orders external to the system itself. No human supervision is required.  Scalability: Population of the agents can be adapted according to the network size. Scalability is also promoted by local and distributed agent interactions.


Cont
Adaptation: The individuals present in the ant system change, die or reproduce, according to the entire network changes. Speed: The individuals in the group change their behavior rapidly, according to the neighbors. The propagation is very fast. Modularity: The behavior of agents is independent of the others in the group. Parallelism: The operations of the individuals are inherently parallel.

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 systems performance The systems are able to adapt to new situations easily

SI APPLICATIONS


 

Military is applying SI techniques to control of unmanned vehicles NASA is applying SI techniques for planetary mapping Medical Research is trying SI based controls for nanobots to fight cancer (Swarm Robotics) SI techniques are applied to load balancing/ routing in telecommunication networks Entertainment industry is applying SI techniques for battle and crowd scenes

Thank You