1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1124284

Format: Download: Pdf
Media: Digital
Pages: 11

ASIN: B00005RZBI

Publication Date: May 1, 2001
Availability: Available for download now

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
What do ants and bees have to do with business? A great deal, it turns out. Individually, social insects are only minimally intelligent, and their work together is largely self-organized and unsupervised. Yet collectively they're capable of finding highly efficient solutions to difficult problems and can adapt automatically to changing environments. Over the past 20 years, the authors and other researchers have developed rigorous mathematical models to describe this phenomenon, which has been dubbed "swarm intelligence," and they are now applying them to business. Their research has already helped several companies develop more efficient ways to schedule factory equipment, divide tasks among workers, organize people, and even plot strategy. Emulating the way ants find the shortest path to a new food supply, for example, has led researchers at Hewlett-Packard to develop software programs that can find the most efficient way to route phone traffic over a telecommunications network. Southwest Airlines has used a similar model to efficiently route cargo. To allocate labor, honeybees appear to follow one simple but powerful rule--they seem to specialize in a particular activity unless they perceive an important need to perform another function. Using that model, researchers at Northwestern University have devised a system for painting trucks that can automatically adapt to changing conditions. In the future, the authors speculate, a company might structure its entire business using the principles of swarm intelligence. The result, they believe, would be the ultimate self-organizing enterprise--one that could adapt quickly and instinctively to fast-changing markets.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

A thought provoking read... January 4, 2002
0 out of 2 found this review helpful

Originally published in the Harvard Business Review (May 2001), this article explains the concept of "Swarm Intelligence" (aka "Emergence Theory") and the opportunities of its application to solving business problems. Swarm Intelligence is derived from the study of the behavior of social insects like ants and bees. Ants are able to find the most efficient route to food sources, for example, by having each member of the colony follow some basic rules. Random interactions from a large population of "agents" or "particles" following these basic rules can evolve a useful pattern over time. The authors cite business advantages to using Swarm Intelligence (specifically robustness, flexibility and self-organization) and provides more than half a dozen examples of real business that are using Swarm Intelligence strategy to solve problems or improve efficiency. The article is targeted to business managers, but can also be appreciated by anyone who is interested in learning about how this concept can have practical human benefits. The article is short (8 pages) though dense with information. For more info on Swarm Intelligence theory, pick this book up: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558605959

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