Co-Fields: Towards a Unifying Model for Swarm Intelligence

Software systems, as currently engineered, are brittle and fragile. New ideas and a new set of engineering principles to effectively build flexible, robust, evolvable and efficient system is required. Swarm intelligent systems in which the paths to problem solving emerge as the result form interactions among individuals and between individuals and their environment seem some of the most promising approaches. This paper presents a general coordination methodology in which swarm’s components are simply driven by abstract force fields and coordination policies emerge by the mutual interaction between agents and agents-generated fields. This model can provide a unifying abstraction for swarm intelligent systems and it can also be exploited to formalize these systems in terms if dynamical systems whose behavior is described in term of differential equations.