swarm intelligence/architecture

Swarm Intelligence

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is an Artificial Intelligence technique involving the study of collective behaviour in decentralized systems.

Such systems are made up by a population of simple agents interacting locally with one other and with their environment. Although there is typically no centralized control dictating the behaviour of the agents, local interactions among the agents often cause a global pattern to emerge. Examples of systems like this can be found in nature, including ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, honey bees, bacteria, and many more.

In contrast to the top-down organization that characterizes many human endeavors, many social species achieve their communal goals using a purely bottom-up approach with no central command-and-control structure.

Swarm technology is proving useful in a wide range of applications including robotics and nanotechnology, molecular biology and medicine, traffic and crowd control, military tactics, and even interactive art. (Particle Swarm Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization)

SI models have many features in common with Evolutionary Algorithms.

The algorithm

Craig Reynolds first compiled the classic flocking algorithm in 1986 in a project simulating the way that birds and other flocking, herding, and schooling animals behave. He called his computer- simulated agents Boids-a contraction of birds and droids. The basic flocking model consists of three simple steering behaviors which describe how an individual boid maneuvers based on the positions and velocities its nearby flockmates:

separation diagram - separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates

alignment diagram - alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates

cohesion diagram - cohesion: steer to move toward the average position of local flockmates

Swarm Architecture

The complexity in our cities is the human interaction, this can be related with the interaction of thousands of different species in the nature. Swarm architecture feeds on data derived from social transactions. Swarm architecture is a true transarchitecture since it builds new transaction spaces, which are at the same time emotive, transactive, interactive and collaborative.

When we look at an urban environment from the point of view of Swarm Architecture we no longer see isolated objects, instead we see objects which have a relation with each other. Swarm-based urban planning is an intriguing and very dynamic design game. It is really challenging for the designer to find the rules that generate excitement in the cities.

http://www.red3d.com/cwr/

http://www.swarmintelligence.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

http://www.sce.carleton.ca/netmanage/tony/swarm.html

http://www.terraswarm.com/traffic_primer/bpp/index.html

http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/boids/

http://interactivearchitectures.blogspot.com/2007/07/emergent-forms-self-organizing.html

http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=407c2973-51f6-4d55-8c7f-99e60e1f818a&lang=en

G09 Alessio Carta / Vagia Pandou / Krystian Kwiecinski