Digital Semiochemical Coordination

Indirect interactions by olfactory stimuli between living organisms are a powerful mechanism for self-organizing coordination in biology. Various adoptions of this paradigm for computer systems however are mainly based on the usage of digital pheromones, although these chemical substances are only one type that mediate indirect interactions. Biology provides an ingenious diversity of such substances, all grouped by the term semiochemicals. In this paper we adopt the principles behind semiochemical coordination in biology and present a model that defines a coarse-grained architecture of selforganizing computer systems based on indirect interactions. This model allows for any combination of semiochemical coordination mechanisms within one single system architecture, which will pave the way for an easier engineering of selforganizing solutions better adapted to complex problems. We further demonstrate how to efficiently combine different types of semiochemical coordination into one mechanism, based on pollination in biology, and evaluate its application to instances of pickup and delivery problems.

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