Stigmergy agent and swarm-intelligence-based multi-agent system

Abstract

Social insect colonies present a highly structured social organization with the fact that they can accomplish complex tasks in spite of the simplicity of their individuals. Swarm intelligence receives high attention in recent years. Stigmergy is an important mechanism for swarm intelligence. This article deliberately studies animal swarm intelligence and their stigmergy mechanism, and applies these principles to multi-agent system study. Firstly, we establish a stigmergy agent model, which is a general architecture, based on stigmergy mechanism and animal task allocation method. Then extended stigmergy architecture is put forward based on Stigmergy Agent architecture, adding direct contact between agents to general stigmergy architecture, which extends the stigmergy application domain. At last we introduce swarm intelligence based multi-agent system, and put forward improved bipartite graph to analysis the multi-agent organization architecture. Some application research directions are also discussed in this article.