Swarm engineering

Swarm Engineering is a term coined by Sanza Kazadi in his PhD thesis by the same title while a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. The term refers to the careful design of groups of agents which have one or more predictable global properties. Swarms are subsets of complex systems whose global properties are complex functions of the behaviors of the individual agents and their interactions. The difficulty in designing such systems arises from the complex interactions between the various parts of the swarm. Stephen WOLFRAM, in his recent book A New Kind of Science, demonstrated that complex interactions could arise from the interactions of exceedingly simple individuals. This problem occurs in swarms as well, complicating the design process.

As of 2007, no agreed upon method for swarm design exists. However, Kazadi describes a middle-meeting methodology which addresses the design problem. This method is a hybrid method which approaches the design in two phases. In the top down phase, the global goal or goals are mathematically expressed and used to form a swarm condition. This swarm condition is a condition that, once satisfied, can guarantee that the global goals are achieved. The second phase, the bottom up phase, consists of generating agent behavior and proving that the behavior satisfies the original swarm condition. The advantage to this middle meeting method is that contradictory global goals can be easily identified, eliminating potentially time-consuming simulation or hardware development stages.

Swarm engineering has applications in a variety of different fields. These fields include biology, economics, management, finance, robotics, engineering, and complex systems.