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On the use of Bio-PEPA for modelling and analysing collective behaviours in swarm robotics

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Abstract

In this paper we analyse a swarm robotics system using Bio-PEPA. Bio-PEPA is a process algebra language originally developed to analyse biochemical systems. A swarm robotics system can be analysed at two levels: the macroscopic level, to study the collective behaviour of the system, and the microscopic level, to study the robot-to-robot and robot-to-environment interactions. In general, multiple models are necessary to analyse a system at different levels. However, developing multiple models increases the effort needed to analyse a system and raises issues about the consistency of the results. Bio-PEPA, instead, allows the researcher to perform stochastic simulation, fluid flow (ODE) analysis and statistical model checking using a single description, reducing the effort necessary to perform the analysis and ensuring consistency between the results. Bio-PEPA is well suited for swarm robotics systems: by using Bio-PEPA it is possible to model distributed systems and their space-time characteristics in a natural way. We validate our approach by modelling a collective decision-making behaviour.

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Notes

  1. Often, such equivalences are congruences, which is a crucial feature for compositional modelling. Intuitively, one would like to build specifications of large systems in a modular way, by composing specifications of sub-systems in order to get those of larger systems. If the specification of one such sub-system, say S 1, is proved to be congruent to another specification, say S 2, then we are allowed to replace S 1 with S 2 in any specification S which has S 1 as sub-component, with the guarantee that the overall behaviour of S will not be affected. Note that this is not guaranteed if one uses equivalences which are not congruences.

  2. This flexibility comes at a cost. Not all analysis methods, such as Gillespie’s stochastic simulation algorithms, can yet deal with the full generality of rate functions or with interactions that depend on more than two species as input to the interaction. Similar caution is needed with the interpretation of numerical solutions of the sets of ordinary differential equations derived from a Bio-PEPA specification. We will address these issues in more detail in the analysis of the robot swarm decision-making strategy in Sect. 5.

  3. Since an implementation of this system using real robots is not available, the physics-based simulation will be considered our ground truth, that is, not another analysis phase, but the subject of our analysis effort.

  4. The mean (variance, resp.) of an Erlang distribution with m phases of rate λ is m/λ (m/λ 2 resp.). Thus an appropriate choice of m and λ can guarantee the required values for the mean and variance, approximating a normal distribution.

  5. In Bio-PEPA, one can make use of a predefined function H which takes a number as an argument. If this number is zero, H returns zero, otherwise it returns 1. To guarantee a minimum number \(\mathit{min\_start}\) of robots in the start area, the rate of action S2L1 can then be defined as: \(S2L1=(\mathit{pSSL} + \mathit{pSLS} + \mathit{pLSS})*\mathit{move}*H((\mathit{RSS} +\mathit{RSL})-\mathit{min\_ start})\); the same must be done for the other related rates.

  6. See Sect. 5.2.1.

  7. Model-checking was performed on an iMAC with a 3.2 GHz Intel core i3 processor and 4 GB memory running the MacOS X operating system.

  8. To guarantee continuity of the ODE model, the H-function has been removed and replaced by setting move=0.03 to approximate a scenario in which k=7.

  9. See http://www.ebi.ac.uk/compneur-srv/sbml/converters/SBMLtoOctave.html.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to the results presented in this paper has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 246939, and by the EU project ASCENS, 257414. Manuele Brambilla, Mauro Birattari and Marco Dorigo acknowledge support from the F.R.S.-FNRS of Belgium’s Wallonia-Brussels Federation. Diego Latella has been partially supported by Project TRACE-IT—PAR FAS 2007–2013—Regione Toscana. The authors would like to thank Stephen Gilmore and Allan Clark (Edinburgh University) for their help with the Bio-PEPA tool suite and templates.

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Massink, M., Brambilla, M., Latella, D. et al. On the use of Bio-PEPA for modelling and analysing collective behaviours in swarm robotics. Swarm Intell 7, 201–228 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11721-013-0079-6

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