Multi-level Modeling and Cooperation Mechanisms of Tasks for Swarm Intelligent Systems

Cooperation is an obvious intelligence feature for Swarm Intelligent Systems (SIS), and where, autonomous task cooperation is one of the core issues for such systems that run in complicated environments, such as factories and aerospace. Focusing on this topic, the mechanisms for modeling and coordinating tasks are deeply studied in this article. After analyzing typical features of task cooperation, a hierarchical architecture of task models is firstly proposed and established, where mission, sub-mission and atom task models are designed, from the top-level to the bottom. Meanwhile, a policy-based parsing mechanism is proposed to autonomously decompose a mission into a set of atom tasks with special constraints. On this basis, resource related entities for various atom tasks are designed uniformly, and for the purpose of behavior synchronization, the concept of virtual logic task is further introduced and Topic-based communication channel is adopted over DDS middleware. Finally, a typical example is given and analyzed. In general, this work provides a feasible idea and method for constructing cooperative swarm intelligent systems.