Toward the Specification and Design of Industrial Synthetic Ecosystems

Many agent-based systems rely for their effectiveness on the intelligence of individual agents, and interaction among agents is required simply to coordinate these individually complex decisions. Specification and design methods for such systems focus on the internal architecture of individual agents. An alternative approach, “Synthetic Ecosystems,” uses relatively simple agents and draws heavily on the dynamics of the interaction among these agents as well as their internal processing to solve domain problems. The specification and design of such systems must include not only the individual agents, but also the structure and dynamics of their interaction. This paper briefly defines and motivates the Synthetic Ecosystems approach and outlines some techniques that have proven useful in specifying and designing them.