Physarum Polycephalum Intelligent Foraging Behaviour and Applications -- Short Review

Physarum polycephalum (Physarum for short) is an example of plasmodial slime moulds that are classified as a fungus "Myxomycetes". In recent years, research on Physarum has become more popular after Nakagaki et al. (2000) performed his famous experiments showing that Physarum was able to find the shortest route through a maze. Physarum) may not have a central information processing unit like a brain, however, recent research has confirmed the ability of Physarum-inspired algorithms to solve a wide range of NP-hard problems. This review will through light on recent Physarum polycephalum biological aspects, mathematical models, and Physarum bio-inspired algorithms and its applications. Further, we have added presented our new model to simulate Physarum in competition, where multiple Physarum interact with each other and with their environments. The bio-inspired Physarum in competition algorithms proved to have great potentials in dealing with graph-optimisation problems in a dynamic environment as in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks, and Discrete Multi-Objective Optimisation problems.