Self-adaptable Group Formation of Reconfigurable Agents in Dynamic Environments

The formation of groups in heterogeneous swarms is important whenever there is benefit from cooperation between the members of a group. Here we investigate decentralized group formation strategies for a set of moving agents that have to collect resources. The agents are reconfigurable and can adapt themselves to the needs of their group. It is assumed that the agents are simple and communication between groups is limited to sensing each other. Members of one group are able to share information about their capabilities and movement decision. Also the decision strategies for integrating a new agent into a group and for the moving direction of a group are simple. Several versions of the system are compared experimentally for a dynamic situation where the number of available resource types changes. It is shown that the costs for reconfiguration influences the optimal strategy for the integration of new agents into a group. The system can adapt the average group size to the number of available resource types.