1st Edition

Search and Foraging Individual Motion and Swarm Dynamics

By Eugene Kagan, Irad Ben-Gal Copyright 2015
    268 Pages 230 B/W Illustrations
    by Chapman & Hall

    Since the start of modern computing, the studies of living organisms have inspired the progress in developing computers and intelligent machines. In particular, the methods of search and foraging are the benchmark problems for robotics and multi-agent systems. The highly developed theory of search and screening involves optimal search plans that are obtained by standard optimization techniques while the foraging theory addresses search plans that mimic the behavior of living foragers.

    Search and Foraging: Individual Motion and Swarm Dynamics examines how to program artificial search agents so that they demonstrate the same behavior as predicted by the foraging theory for living organisms. For cybernetics, this approach yields techniques that enable the best online search planning in varying environments. For biology, it allows reasonable insights regarding the internal activity of living organisms performing foraging tasks.

    The book discusses foraging theory as well as search and screening theory in the same mathematical and algorithmic framework. It presents an overview of the main ideas and methods of foraging and search theories, making the concepts of one theory accessible to specialists of the other. The book covers Brownian walks and Lévy flight models of individual foraging and corresponding diffusion models and algorithms of search and foraging in random environments both by single and multiple agents. It also describes the active Brownian motion models for swarm dynamics with corresponding Fokker–Planck equations. Numerical examples and laboratory verifications illustrate the application of both theories.

    Introduction
    Group Testing
    Search and Screening
    Games of Search
    Foraging
    Goal and Structure of This Book

    Methods of Optimal Search and Screening
    Location Probabilities and Search Density
    Search for a Static Target
    Search for a Moving Target

    Methods of Optimal Foraging
    Preying and Foraging by Patches
    Spatial Dynamics of Populations
    Methods of Optimal Foraging
    Inferences and Restrictions

    Models of Individual Search and Foraging
    Movements of the Agents and Their Trajectories
    Brownian Search and Foraging
    Foraging by Lévy Flights
    Algorithms of Probabilistic Search and Foraging

    Coalitional Search and Swarm Dynamics
    Swarming and Collective Foraging
    Foraging by Multiple Foragers in Random Environment
    Modeling by Active Brownian Motion
    Turing System for the Swarm Foraging

    Remarks on Swarm Robotic Systems for Search and Foraging

    Conclusion

    Bibliography

    Index

    A Summary appears at the end of each chapter.

    Biography

    Eugene Kagan is a senior lecturer in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Ariel University and an advisor in the Department of Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His research interests include dynamical systems theory, applied probability, and robotics.

    Irad Ben-Gal is a professor and the chair of the Department of Industrial Engineering at Tel Aviv University. His research interests include applied probability, machine learning and information theory applications to industrial and service systems as well as business analytics applications.

    "The book is valuable reading both for teaching inspiration as well as for research insights into optimization, modeling, mathematical biology, and robot programming."
    Zentralblatt MATH 1327