Swarm Intelligence and Its Applications 2014

Swarm intelligence (SI) represents the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems. SI systems consist typically of a population of simple agents that interact locally with one another and with their environment. The inspiration of SI originates from biological systems. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of intelligence, unknown to the individual agents. Natural examples of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling. Besides the applications to conventional optimization problems, SI is employed in various fields such as library materials acquisition, communications, medical dataset classification, dynamic control, heating system planning, moving objects tracking, pattern recognition, and statistical prediction.