Initial experiments in using communication swarms to improve the performance of swarm systems

Swarm intelligence can provide robust, adaptable, scalable solutions to difficult problems. The distributed nature of swarm activity is the basis of these desirable qualities, but it also prevents swarm-based techniques from having direct access to global knowledge that could facilitate the task at hand. Our experiments indicate that a swarm system can use an auxiliary swarm, called a communication swarm, to create and distribute an approximation of useful global knowledge, without sacrificing robustness, adaptability, and scalability. We describe a communication swarm and validate its effectiveness on a simple problem.