Modeling Self-Organizing Systems with Social Insects Algorithms

Abstract

Self-organization is common in natural systems. This tutorial<br />describes some of these systems, speci&macr;cally from insect societies like in bees, termites or ant colonies. In a first part, a modeling process is explained. Objects and phenomena targeted by these methods are presented. Natural<br />or social complex systems are the context of these objects and phenomena. Basic algorithms presented for example in [8] are given. These algorithms belongs to the class of swarm intelligence methods describing how a network of interacting entities can lead to emergent properties of the whole system. In a second part, more original applications are presented, based on extensions of these basic algorithms in order to model ecosystems, urban dynamics or to propose a decentralized method to distribute simulations over dynamical<br />communication graphs.

Keywords

• swarm intelligence, complex systems, ant colony optimiza- tion, self-organization, emergent properties