Abstract
Honey bee colonies consist of tens of thousands of interacting bees. The colony has only limited centralised control and many of its functions arise from the self-organised actions of individual bees. We use an example from nectar foraging to illustrate how process algebras may be used to describe formally the behaviour of bees as communicating agents. Logical properties of a ‘colony’ of these agents are then established and a computer simulation is described which adds dynamics to the process algebra description.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Beckers, R., Deneubourg, J.L., Goss, S.: Trails and U-turns in the selection of the shortest path by the ant Lasius niger. Journal of Theoretical Biology 159, 397–415 (1992)
Bonabeau, E.W., Theraulaz, G.: Why Do We Need Artificial Life? In: Langton, C.G. (ed.) Artificial Life: An Overview, pp. 303–325. MIT Press, Cambridge (1995)
Bonabeau, E.W., Theraulaz, G., Deneubourg, J.-L., Aron, S., Camazine, S.: Self-Organization in Social Insects. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 12, 188–193 (1997)
Bruns, G.: Systems Engineering with CCS. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1997)
Hoare, C.A.R.: Communicating Sequential Processes. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1985)
Milner, R.: Communication and Concurrency. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1989)
Seeley, T.D.: The Wisdom of the Hive Harvard University Press, London (1995)
Stirling, C.: Modal and Temporal Logics for Processes, LFCS report ECS-LFCS- 92-221 Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh (1992)
Terna, P.: ABCDE: Agent based chaotic dynamic emergence. In: Sichman, J.S., Conte, R., Gilbert, N. (eds.) MABS 1998. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 1534, pp. 79–94. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)
Tofts, C.: Describing Social Insect Behaviour Using Process Algebra. Transactions of the Society for Computer Simulation, 227–283 (1992)
Tofts, C.: Processes with Probabilities, Priority and Time. Formal Aspects of Computing 3, 536–564 (1993)
The Concurrency Workbench, http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/cwb/
The Swarm Simulation System, http://www.santafe.edu/swarm/
StarLogo Models of Biological Superstructures, http://www.psu.edu/dept/beehive/starlogo/starlogo.htm
Honey Bee Simulation Homepage, http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/dsumpter/beesim/index.html
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sumpter, D.J.T., Broomhead, D.S. (1998). Formalising the Link between Worker and Society in Honey Bee Colonies. In: Sichman, J.S., Conte, R., Gilbert, N. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems and Agent-Based Simulation. MABS 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1534. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10692956_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10692956_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65476-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49246-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive