Rate of reconfiguration convergence in Swarms

We have studied the rate of reconfiguration of Swarms with external disturbances, such as occurs in problems of fire fighting with constant resources against changing fire lines. We have carried out the investigation by using actual computer experiments on Swarms composed of 10 to 18 CPU's. The goal was to establish the dependence of the reconfiguration rate on the actual physical parameters of the CPU's used, the number of units, the initial configuration errors and the total resources of the Swarm. The results confirm qualitatively earlier finding by computer simulation. They are also confirming the theoretical result that, under rather general conditions, the Swarm can be made to converge in a time which is independent on its size. The type of disturbances under which this is possible are the most likely to occur in physical, practical problems. New results on the dependence of the rate of convergence on the shape of the external signal, confirm the intuitive notion that the Swarm will reconfigure faster if the disturbance has high spatial frequency since the parallelism of the Swarm algorithm is being utilized to a larger extent than for low frequency disturbances. >