Artificial Ant Colonies Can Solve Difficult Computational Problems

The study of social insects behavior and of their self-organizing capacities is interesting for computer scientists because it provides models of distributed organization which can be used to solve difficult optimization and distributed control problems. In the talk I will briefly present some models derived from the observation of real ants and other social insects. I will then present an example of how these models can be used to design multi-agent systems for the solution of problems like distributed and adaptive routing in Internet-like networks and NP-hard combinatorial optimization.