Study Notes: Self-organization of Sensors for Swarm Intelligence

The author of this paper is Gerardo Beni who is famous on the field of swarm intelligence.

This paper is difficult for me to understand the whole meaning, but I still can grasp some of the concepts. The most interesting thing of this paper is that they designed the special swarm unit was called “signpost” which is responsible for the communication between the normal swarm units (detector).

The structure of the swarm must be re-optimized whenever external condition change, and if the total number of units in the swarm remains constant, some units must change the subgroup to which they belong. This is the basic task of self-reorganizing.

The key optimization problem in the sensing swarm design is the optimization of the number of units in each subgroup. Such optimization generally requires the communication of the set of the structures throughout the swarm, and this task was achieved by signposts.

The author of this paper model the swarm as a set composed of two types of members, the (detecting) units and the signposts, circulating in a closed ring with an average speed differential among them. When a detecting unit passes by a signpost the unit can be read, written, or erased by the signpost, and the each signpost will recalculate the average at every completion of a revolution (around the ring).

The model proposed solves the three difficulties in achieving the self-organization, i.e 1)the knowledge of the average value of the external variable; 2)the distributed calculation of the optimized swarm structure; and 3) the achievement of the new swarm structure. For all three operations the key elements are the signposts.