Uncovering the social interaction network in swarm intelligence algorithms

Swarm intelligence is the collective behavior emerging in systems with locally interacting components. Because of their self-organization capabilities, swarm-based systems show essential properties for handling real-world problems, such as robustness, scalability, and flexibility. Yet, we fail to understand why swarm-based algorithms work well, and neither can we compare the various approaches in the literature. The absence of a common framework capable of characterizing these several swarm-based algorithms, transcending their particularities, has led to a stream of publications inspired by different aspects of nature without a systematic comparison over existing approaches. Here we address this gap by introducing a network-based framework—the swarm interaction network—to examine computational swarm-based systems via the optics of the social dynamics. We investigate the structure of social interaction in four swarm-based algorithms, showing that our approach enables researchers to study distinct algorithms from a common viewpoint. We also provide an in-depth case study of the Particle Swarm Optimization, revealing that different communication schemes tune the social interaction in the swarm, controlling the swarm search mode. With the swarm interaction network, researchers can study swarm algorithms as systems, removing the algorithm particularities from the analyses while focusing on the structure of the swarm social interaction.