A guide to eusocial insect faulted agent resilience and its engineering applications.

Abstract

Resilience is a vital aspect of modern systems, especially in multi-agent systems, where faulted agents (agents who do not behave properly) can compromise system performance. In response to this need for resilience, we turn to biological inspiration. Eusocial insects are a subset of insects that have caste-based labor distribution and cooperative brood care. These insects face analogous challenges in maintaining and improving resilience to external threats, making them prime examples to find unique biological solutions to resilience problems. Thus, the central question of this work is:How can eusocial insect behavior be used to inspire new approaches to prevent or limit faulted agents from impacting the performance of multi-agent systems? Engineers, however, do not always have the necessary biological expertise to identify behaviors to mimic. This article seeks to fill the following identified gap in current research and resources:There is need to study the impact of biologically inspired behaviors on faulted agent resilience, but engineers may struggle to identify sources in the biological literature to translate into engineering applications.To address this question and the identified gap, we provide a guide identifying a large range of insect resilience behaviors and examples of possible implementation of these behaviors. This guide is a functional decomposition examining how eusocial insects prevent disease propagation that engineers can transfer to their systems when seeking to mitigate faulted agents. The presented functional decomposition is made of 148 identified functions across 7 levels, organized into 5 primary categories. This provides a guide for engineers to use when looking for sources of inspiration to improve system resilience. Additional discussion is also provided to offer potential implementations of these 148 functions, so as to encourage further work and usage of this work.