Swarm Intelligence - conductorless orchestra

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is a kind of Artificial Intelligence that emerges from local interactions. By principle, systems based on SI are decentralized - they do not have access to the global knowledge. The initial study on SI was on the natural swarms, e.g., ants, flocks of birds, and schools of fish. Swarms have an ability to self-organize, which brings a unique set of features and applications. Despite their origin in biology, SI systems were adopted into technology. At the very beginning, they were used to solve optimization problems, e.g., Ant Colony Optimization and Particle Swarm Optimization; however, they were later adopted in the field of robotics, which is called swarm robotics. Although those are two primary fields of research in SI, other applications, such as in telecommunications, are also presented in this article. Furthermore, the problem of creating SI systems and the current methods used for designing and modeling the swarm systems are presented.