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International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World

ESAW 2002: Engineering Societies in the Agents World III pp 68–81Cite as

Co-Fields: Towards a Unifying Approach to the Engineering of Swarm Intelligent Systems

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNAI,volume 2577)

Abstract

Swarm intelligent systems, in which the paths to problem solving emerge as the result of interactions between simple autonomous components (agents or ants) and between them and their environment, appear very promising to develop robust and flexible software application. However, the variety of swarm-based approaches that have been proposed so far still lacks a common modeling and engineering methodology. In the attempt to overcome this problem, this paper presents a general coordination methodology in which swarm’s components are simply driven by abstract computational force fields (Co-Fields), generated either by agents, or by the environment. By having agents be driven in their activities by such fields, globally coordinated behaviors can naturally emerge. Although this model still does not offer a complete engineering methodology, it can provide a unifying abstraction for swarm intelligent systems and it can also be exploited to formalize these systems in terms of dynamical systems whose behavior can be described via differential equations. Several example of swarm systems modeled with Co-Fields are presented to support our thesis.

Keywords

  • Swarm Intelligence
  • Field Surface
  • Security Guard
  • Coordination Task
  • Equipotential Line

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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  • DOI: 10.1007/3-540-39173-8_6
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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell.Informazione, Univ. di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Via Vignolese 905, 41100, Modena, Italy

    Marco Mamei & Letizia Leonardi

  2. Dipartimento di Scienze e Metodi dell.Ingegneria, Univ. di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Via Allegri 13, 42100, Modena, Italy

    Marco Mamei & Franco Zambonelli

Authors
  1. Marco Mamei
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  2. Franco Zambonelli
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  3. Letizia Leonardi
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence Intelligent Agents and New Media Group, Schottengasse 3, 1010, Vienna, Austria

    Paolo Petta

  2. AG Netzbasierte Informationssysteme, Freie Universität Berlin Institut für Informatik, Takustr. 9, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Robert Tolksdorf

  3. Dipartimento di Scienze e Metodi dell’Ingegneria, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Via Allegri 13, 42100, Reggio Emilia, Italy

    Franco Zambonelli

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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Mamei, M., Zambonelli, F., Leonardi, L. (2003). Co-Fields: Towards a Unifying Approach to the Engineering of Swarm Intelligent Systems. In: Petta, P., Tolksdorf, R., Zambonelli, F. (eds) Engineering Societies in the Agents World III. ESAW 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2577. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-39173-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-39173-8_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-14009-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39173-9

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