Ant-like missionaries and cannibals: synthetic pheromones for distributed motion control

Many applied problems in domains such as military operations, manufacturing, and logistics require that entities change location under certain constraints. These problems are traditionally addressed with centralized control mechanisms, which become bottlenecks and points of vulnerability. More recent multi-agent negotiation schemes enable the entities to maintain the desired constraints among themselves in decentralized fashion. This paper explores a particularly simple form of coordination that replaces central coordination and agent-to-agent communication with interaction through a shared environment. Inspired by pheromone mechanisms in natural insect populations, this method is capable of solving the classical Missionaries and Cannibals movement problem. We illustrate how agents can be programmed to interact using synthetic pheromones, and evaluate the performance of our algorithms for four different levels of pheromone information and two different approaches to constructing the f...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: AGENTS
• Authors: H. Van Dyke Parunak, Sven Brueckner
• Keywords: AGENTS 2000, Entities Change Location, Keywords Synthetic Pheromones, Security Privacy, Synthetic Pheromones