The Meaning of Semiochemicals to the Design of Self-Organizing Systems

In biology, many organisms coordinate their interactions in a self-organizing and emergent way solely by means of indirect communication based on chemical substances. These so-called semiochemicals comprise pheromones, mediating the coordination between organisms of the same species, as well as allelochemics, such as allomones, kairomones, synomones, and apneumones, mediating the coordination between organisms of different species. In order to exploit this biological diversity for the engineering of well adapted coordination mechanisms for self-organizing emergent multi-agent systems, the micro- and macroscopic effects of the different types of semiochemicals have to be better understood. In this paper, we analyze these effects and based on that provide design guidelines that identify appropriate types of digital semiochemicals to use for the interactions between agents on the local level in order to achieve certain required effects on the global level. We apply these guidelines within an existing engineering methodology and present as a result an iteratively refined model of a decentralized coordination mechanism well adapted for the solution of pickup and delivery problems by self-organizing emergent multi-agent systems.