Swarm Intelligence - what kinds of problems are effectively solved?

Question

I am looking for practical problem (or implementations, applications) examples which are effectively algoritmized using swarm intelligence. I found that multicriteria optimization is one example. Are there any others?

IMHO swarm-intelligence should be added to the tags

Answer 1

Swarm intelligence is a field of biologically-inspired artificial intelligence based on the behavioral models of social insects such as ants, bees, wasps, termites, etc. A Swarm is a configuration of tens of thousands of individuals that have chosen their own will to converge on a common goal. It is the Complex Collective, Self-Organized, Coordinated, Flexible and Robust Behaviour of a group following the simple rules.

There are real-world applications that are based on SI are those that often required coordination and cooperation techniques, optimization process, exploratory analysis, dynamical problems, etc. Some of these are:

• Optimization techniques (mathematical functions for example)

• Coordination of a swarm of bots(to organize inventory for example)

• Routing in communication networks. (This is also dynamical combinatorial optimization)

• Data analysis (usually exploratory, like clustering). SI has a lot of applications in data mining and machine learning. This permits the SI algorithms to find interesting patterns in big sets of data.

• NP problems in general

I'm sure there are a lot more. You should check the book:

"Swarm Intelligence: from natural to artificial systems".