Stigmergic Collaborative Agents

Abstract

Various metaheuristics have been successfully employed to address $\mathcal{NP}$-hard problems. Many strategies adopt techniques inspired from nature to efficiently find high-quality near-optimal solutions for complex real-world problems. In [47] is proposed a combination between Ant Colony Systems (ACS) and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) to produce a more powerful method to efficiently address $\mathcal{NP}$-hard problems. The agents that form a system inter-operate to produce a solution using both direct and indirect (stigmergic) communication. In this way, intelligent problem solutions can naturally emerge due to stigmergy (see section 3.1).