Swarm Intelligence studies the collective behaviors of agents interacting in their environment, causing "intelligent" patterns to emerge. Swarm intelligence explores collective (or distributed) problem solving without centralized control.

It was inspired by the study of ant colonies, which discover food sources by sending out foragers. When they find food, the forager ants drop trails of scent (pheromones) that the other ants follow. Eventually, the pheromones evaporate, but as more and more ants follow the trails, more pheromone trails are created. The shorter the trail, the more regularly it is refreshed by pheromones. Consequently, the swarm of ants finds that it is attracted to the shortest, most efficient route.

From this observation of nature have come ant colony optimization algorithms which have had various applications, from discovering the most efficient routes for transportation of goods to identifying optimal routing through a telecommunications network.

• Technology Pillars
  • Agent-based Modeling
  • Swarm Intelligence
  • Evolutionary Computation
  • Distributed Computing