|
Biomorphic Multiagents Systems Research Group This group works for the research project "Modelagem de Organizações Decentralizadas em Coordenação de Agentes: Comportamento Emergente em Superorganismos e Aplicações" financially supported by CAPES through the CAPES/BAVIERA cooperation program. A social insect colony (swarm) operates without any explicit coordination. An individual worker cannot assess the needs of the colony, it just has a fairly simple local information, and no one is in charge of coordination. From individual workers aggregation, the colony behavior emerges without any type of explicit coordination or planning. The key feature of this emergent behavior is the plasticity in division of labor inside the colony. Colonies respond to changing conditions by adjusting the ratios of individual workers engaged in the various tasks. Multi-agent Systems need to manage the problems dynamics such as variation in the number of agents, changes in environment and in the system's goals. The question is how to coordinate the agents in dynamic enviroments. Most of the works in this area focus on techniques of coordination that needs wide explicit communication or a central coordinator. We focus on a paradigm based on colonies of social insects, where there are plenty of evidences of ecological success, despite the apparent lack of explicit coordination. Our aim is to study and experiment if such approach can be used for coordination in multi-agent systems. |
