Comparing the performance of heterogeneous and homogeneous swarms

This thesis compares the performance of heterogeneous and homogenous swarms. Swarms are defined as particles or agents which react to their environment and fellow particles or agents according to social rules. Three attributes weights of an individual agent were varied for these experiments: Collision Avoidance with individual agents in the swarm, Center of Mass of the swarm and the parameter that controls Velocity Matching in the swarm. In homogenous swarms, all individuals had the same attribute weights while in heterogeneous swarms weights for one attribute were taken from a normal distribution for the population. Results show that heterogeneous swarms outperformed homogenous swarms if the weights for the Center of Mass Weight attribute were heterogeneous in the population. The Collision Avoidance and Matched Velocity attributes showed little performance difference for heterogeneous and homogenous swarms. However, swarms heterogeneous in the Matched Velocity parameter showed substantial performance improvements for the most difficult map.