Illustrating the Contrasting Roles of Self-Organization in Biological Systems with Two Case Histories of Collective Decision Making in the Honey Bee

Abstract

Abstract.One of the unique features of the organization in honeybee societies is the ability to adapt to environmental circumstances in a highly decentralized way. This adaptation takes the form of changes in the allocation of bees to roles, whereby bees individually decide to take up certain roles that require attention. Within the domain of computational modeling of multi-agent systems a trend has developed to model such systems from an organizational perspective. Usually this is done by describing multi-agent systems as organizations using structural elements such as roles and groups, and behavioral properties of these elements: for example, expressions for role behavior, specifying how agents should behave once they fulfill a certain role. In dynamic environments, changes in environmental circumstances may require changes in such organizations as well. In this paper, the change process as seen in honeybee colonies has been modeled by means of techniques from the domain of multi-agent organizations. This results in an adaptive multi-agent organizational model that is able to cope with changing environmental circumstances.