ABSTRACT
In parallel, biological observations and studies of collective behavior of animals (Bell, 1990; McElreath & Boyd, 2007; Sumpter, 2010), in particular, of ant colonies (Gordon, 2010; Holldobler & Wilson, 1990; Wilson, 1971), allowed to consider the swarm as a kind of superorganism (Holldobler & Wilson, 2009). A combination of this approach with recent advances in cybernetics and arti›- cial intelligence led to consideration of the swarm intelligence (Kennedy, Eberhart, & Shi, 2001; Panigrahi, Shi, & Lim, 2011; Weiss, 1999), and to intensive studies of bio-inspired methods in computation (Adamatzky, Costello, & Asai, 2005; Siegelmann, 1998), optimization (Dorigo & Stutzle, 2004; Passino, 2005) and robotics (Clark, 1997; McFarland & Bösser, 1993). The progress in this direction is represented by the series of conferences on simulation and adaptive behavior (From Animals to Animats, 1991-2012) and on swarm intelligence (ANTS, 1998-2014) and in the series of symposia on distributed autonomous robotic systems (Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems, 1992-2013).
