CA agents for all-to-all communication are faster in the triangulate grid

Abstract

The objective was to find the behaviour of agents to solve the all-to-all-communication task in the cyclic triangulate and square grids in shortest time. The agents should be reliable, meaning that they are successful on almost any initial configuration. In order to solve the problem, the multi-agent system was modeled by Cellular Automata with synchronous updating, and the behavior of the agents was modeled by an embedded finite state machine (FSM). Agents can move or stay, and turn to any direction. An agent is able to leave a trace by setting a color flag on its site. Colors allow indirect communication similar to pheromones, speed up the task and contribute to a better reliability. More reliable agents could be found by using different initial control states for the agent's FSMs. A simple genetic procedure based on mutation was used to evolve near optimal FSMs for the triangulate and square grid. Agents in the triangulate grid can solve the task in around 2/3 of the time compared to agents in the square grid. The communication time depends also on the density of agents in the field, e.g. agents with density 4/(16 x 16) turned out to be the slowest. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.