Formal Cognitive Modeling of Swarm Intelligence for Decision-Making Optimization Problems

Abstract

Decision-making is one of the most important cognitive processes in psychology, with outstanding implications in a number of fields including systems neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, brain and cognitive sciences, logic, computation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and many others. Basically, it consists of the process of identification and selection of an option or course of action among several alternatives, based on values, criteria, beliefs, and any other information available to the decision maker. The final output of the decision-making cognitive process is a choice, which may (or not) prompt action. Swarm intelligence is one of the tools typically applied to the decision-making process in optimization problems. This chapter aims at discussing this issue from the standpoint of cognitive informatics, an emerging interdisciplinary domain of cognition and information sciences, encompassing the study of internal information processing mechanisms and cognitive processes of the human brain and mind, the underlying abstract intelligence theories and denotational mathematics, and their potential applications in fields such as cognitive computing or computational intelligence. In this chapter, we provide a formal model of the swarm intelligence paradigm for the cognitive processes typically involved in decision-making for optimization problems.