The Swarm in the Box - Systematic Simulations for the Evaluation of Engineered Swarming Systems

Sven Brückner

Altarum Institute Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

As swarming and other self-organizing approaches to engineering complex (software) systems move from simple feasibility demonstrations to deployable applications, the need for systematic validation and evaluation of such systems arises. Self-organizing systems offer robustness, flexibility, scalability and adaptability for significantly lower engineering costs, because the individual components that need to be constructed are of significantly lower complexity than the overall system. But, as the system-level complexity arises from the complex and dynamically changing interactions of these simple components in a shared dynamical environment, tracking, understanding and evaluating the operation of the application becomes a major challenge. In our agent-based and complex systems research, we have constructed and evaluated self-organizing systems in domains as diverse as information retrieval, control of autonomous vehicles or manufacturing design and control. Along the way we have adopted and refined tools and methodologies that support the systematic evaluation of these systems in a general simulation and analysis framework. My presentation will present our engineering and evaluation approach and demonstrate it in a number of example applications.