The swarm application framework
Don Miner, Marie Ellen Desjardins, Peter Mackenzie Hamilton · 2008
The Swarm Application Framework (SAF) is a tool that makes the development of swarm applications more intuitive. Traditionally, swarm applications are created by programming several low-level rules. This approach leads to several problems in designing and testing swarms, which serve as inspiration for the features of SAF. SAF encourages a new paradigm for designing swarm applications: engineers can interact with a swarm at the abstract (swarm) level instead of the individual (agent) level. In this paper, we discuss the design of the framework, how agents and rules in SAF operate, and a planned rule abstraction feature.