Synthesizing stigmergy for multi agent systems

Authors:
Grant Blaise O’Reilly;Elizabeth Ehlers
Affiliations:
Academy of Information Technology, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa;Academy of Information Technology, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
Venue:
PRIMA'06 Proceedings of the 9th Pacific Rim international conference on Agent Computing and Multi-Agent Systems
Year:
2006

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Abstract

In order to synthesize stigmergy a model needs to be created that allows a collective of agents to achieve global results through local interactions in some environment. This locality of interactions between the agents and between the agent and the environment allows for the distribution of the entire system without any centralization. Stigmergy is found among social insects in nature. These natural systems show remarkable flexibility, robustness and self-organisation. These characteristics are sort after in modern software systems. Utilizing stigmergy in an artificial system allows agents to interact with one another and with the general topology in a non-centralized manner, thus giving rise to a collective solution when solving of certain tasks. Even though the agents are localized their interaction with the stigmergy layer allows other agents to be affected by the interactions. The methology of mimicking stigmergy into a software system will be described and a description of the model used to synthesize stigmergy will be given. The potential utilization of stigmergy by software agents to interact with each other and to solve certain tasks collectively is also demonstrated.