Colony: An Artificial Life Model for Active Autonomous Objects

Abstract

Appropriate aids on top of the primitive object-oriented model will help promote better understanding of the semantics of applications and allow us to focus better on the various aspects of given problems. This study focuses on the exploration of a design model and the corresponding programming framework for the modelling and implementation of applications involving active autonomous objects based on the object technology. The proposed design model is an artificial life model based on the colony phenomenon in nature. This model can naturally be mapped onto an object-oriented implementation. The colony model favours a predicate-based object communication/coordination pattern as opposed to the navigational message-passing paradigm seen in programming languages such as C++. The proposed model is particularly appealing to us, for it presents a unifying conceptual design model and programming framework for a wide class of applications including neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy expert systems. The ideas presented are illustrated through a genetic algorithm problem.