Prologue

In its beginnings, Artificial Intelligence has gained it's inspiration for the individual behavior from the human being, searching to reproduce their reasoning. It has thus focused on how to represent the knowledge of an expert and model their decision process, to construct systems with intelligent results. However in nature, we observe many forms of intelligence. Researchers said why not take into consideration an intelligence which is not individual but collective? So they have constructed multi-agent systems that draw inspiration from a group of human experts. Another source of inspiration is that of insect societies.

In that way, swarm intelligence is born, which finds many applications in the field of simulations and beyond, for example, in collective robotics or in networks.

Examples of collective behaviors in animal societies. On left, fish shoaling formed by alignment of the individuals on a common displacement direction, on the right, a similar phenomenon is responsible for birds flock.