Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Genetic Stigmergy: Framework And Applications, Joshua A. Brandoff

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Stigmergy has long been studied and recognized as an effective system for self-organization among social insects. Through the use of chemical agents known as pheromones, insect colonies are capable of complex collective behavior often beyond the scope of an individual agent. In an effort to develop human-made systems with the same robustness, scientists have created artificial analogues of pheromone-based stigmergy, but these systems often suffer from scalability and complexity issues due to the problems associated with mimicking the physics of pheromone diffusion. In this thesis, an alternative stigmergic framework called 'Genetic Stigmergy' is introduced. Using this framework, agents can indirectly …