Swarm Technology
“The Power of
Simplicity”
-Abhilash Nayak
Regd. No. :0801227285
CS1(B)
abhilash.nayak01@[Link]
Introduction
What is Swarm Intelligence (SI)?
“The emergent collective intelligence of groups of simple
agents.”
Swarm intelligence (SI) as defined by Bonabeau, Dorigo and
Theraulaz is “any attempt to design algorithms or distributed
problem-solving devices inspired by the collective behavior
of social insect colonies and other animal societies”
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Examples
Swarms build colonies and work in a coordinated
manner — yet no single member of the swarm is
in control.
Flocks of birds coordinate to move without
collision.
Ants manage to find food sources quickly and
efficiently.
Termites build giant structures.
Schools of fish fend off predators and move as
one body
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Why do we need new computing
techniques?
The computer revolution changed human
societies:
Communication & Transportation
Industrial production
Administration, writing and bookkeeping
Technological advances
Entertainment
However, some problems cannot be tackled with
traditional hardware and software!
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Drawbacks of traditional techniques
Computing tasks have to be :-
Well-defined
Fairly
predictable
Computable in reasonable time with serial
computers.
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Working
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Why Social Colony is a source
of inspiration?
•Flexible: the colony can respond to internal
perturbations and external challenges
• Robust: tasks are completed even if some
individuals fail
• Decentralized: there is no central control(ler) in
the colony
• Self-organized: paths to solutions are emergent
rather than predefined
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Ants
Why are ants interesting?
◦ ants solve complex tasks by simple local means
◦ ant productivity is better than the sum of their single activities
◦ ants are ‘grand masters’ in search and exploitation
Which mechanisms are important?
◦ cooperation and division of labour
◦ adaptive task allocation
◦ work stimulation by cultivation
◦ pheromones
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Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)
Isinspired by the behavior of ant colonies .
Ability of Optimization in finding shortest path.
Ants leave a chemical pheromone trail.
Pheromone trails enables them to find shortest paths
between their nest and food sources
Ants find the shorter path in an experimental setup
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A bridge leads from a nest to a foraging area, (a) 4 minutes
after bridge placement, (b) 8 minutes after bridge placement
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Ant Foraging
Cooperative search by pheromone trails
1. The natural behavior of these ants and be programmed
into an ant algorithm, which we can use to find the shortest
path within graphs.
2. As ants move they leave behind a chemical substance
called pheromone, which other ants can smell and identify
that an ant has been there before.
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ACO algorithm
Main steps of the ACO algorithm are given below:
Pheromone trail initialization
Solution construction using pheromone trail
Each ant constructs a complete solution to the problem
according to a probabilistic
State transition rule. The state transition rule depends
mainly on the state of the pheromone .
Pheromone trail update.
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algorithm
1: repeat
2: if antCount < maxAnts then
3: create a new ant
4: set initial state
5: end if
6: for all ants do
7: determine all feasible neighbor states
{considering the ant's visited states}
8 : if solution found V no feasible neighbor state then
9: kill ant
10: if we use delayed pheromone update then
11: evaluate solution
12: deposit pheromone on all used edges
13: end if
14: else
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15: stochastically select a feasible neighbor state
{directed by the ants memory, the
pheromone concentration on the edges and local
heuristics}
16: if we use step-by-step pheromone update then
17: deposit pheromone on the used edge
18: end if
19: end if
20: end for
21: evaporate pheromone until termination criterion
satisfied {e.g., found a satisfying solution}
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Applications of Ant Colony
Optimization
Traffic on telecommunications systems, the internet, roads, rail, and
sea would all benefit from the reduction in congestion that efficient
routing algorithms could provide.
Modern airlines are actually putting the ant colony research to work,
with impressive payback
Telecommunication System Airlines
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Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)
Idea: Used to optimize continuous functions
Function is evaluated at each time step for the agent’s
current position
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Each agent “remembers” personal best value of the
function (pbest)
Globally best personal value is known (gbest)
Both points are attracting the agent
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Formula for one agent in one dimension:
vx = vx + [Link]().(pbestx - presentx)+
[Link]().(gbestx - presentx) ----(a)
Where 0 ≤ rand() ≤ 1
presentx= presentx+vx ----(b)
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The pseudo code of the procedure is as follows
For each particle
Initialize particle
END
Do
For each particle
Calculate fitness value
If the fitness value is better than the best
fitness value (pBest) in history
set current value as the new pBest
End
Choose the particle with the best fitness value of
all the particles as the gBest
For each particle
Calculate particle velocity according equation
(a)
Update particle position according equation (b)
End
While maximum iterations or minimum error criteria is not
attained
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Solving some of the NP-Hard
Problems using Swarm
Intelligence
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Hard Problems
Well-defined, but computational hard problems
•NP hard problems (Travelling Salesman Problem)
•Action-response planning (Chess playing)
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Hard Problems
Fuzzy problems
•intelligent human-machine interaction
•natural language understanding
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Hard Problems
Hardly predictable and dynamic problems
•real-world autonomous robots
•management and business planning
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Problems
Complex NP complete problems.
Vehicle routing.
Network maintenance.
The traveling salesperson.
Computing the shortest route
between two points.
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Travelling Salesman Problem
1. Visit cities in order to make
sales.
2. Save on travel costs.
3. Visit each city once
(Hamiltonian circuit).
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Combinatorial Explosion in Travelling Salesman Problem
If there are N cities, then the number of
different paths among them is 1.2……(N-1).
Time to examine single path = N.
Total time to perform the search = (N-1)!
For 10 cities, time reqd. = 10! = 3,268,800.
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Solution of TSP by Swarm Intelligence
Use of agents for TSP problem.
They sense and dispense pheromone.
Memory to back step through the graph.
Each agent starts at a random starting city.
Once agent finishes a tour, it determines
the size of the tour.
Then pheromone is added to the tour, the
shorter the tour, the higher the pheromone
level.
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How do we design Swarm Intelligence
Systems?
It is a 3-step process.
1. Identification of analogies: in swarm biology and
IT systems.
2. Understanding: computer modeling of realistic
swarm biology.
3. Engineering: model simplification and tuning for
IT applications.
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Bad News , Good News
Bad news
• Difficult to predict collective behaviour from individual rules.
• Interrogate one of the participants, it won’t tell you anything
about the function of the group.
• Small changes in rules lead to different group-level behaviour.
• Individual behaviour looks like noise: how do you detect
threats?
Good news
• Possible to efficiently control organization or
manipulate groups using simple rules.
• Possible to predict group-level outcome using bottom
simulation.
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Applications of SI
Swarm/crowd simulation programming
Computer Networks: Adaptive Routing
Robotics/Artificial Intelligence
Process optimization /Staff Scheduling
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Conclusion
Scientists are realizing SI’s potential.
The use of ant algorithms within computing
systems has helped to solidify swarm
intelligence’s place in the computing world.
Already researchers are observing other social
animals, such as bees and schools of fish in
order to utilize it in future applications and
algorithms.
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Any Questions?
Thank You!
