Software Workspace for creating and testing Algorithmic Responses based on Meta-heuristic Experimental Designs (SWARMED)

Military operators are challenged by managing, gaining information from, and reacting to autonomous systems. Additional challenges arise from providing autonomous systems with the means to maintain resilience, be adaptable, and help military operators understand the control strategies employed by autonomous systems, whether those strategies are intentional or arise from emergent interactions. These challenges lend themselves to meta-heuristic control strategies because it is difficult to determine a priori which strategies will perform well and system architects have insufficient heuristic information to leverage for their designs. To address these system design issues, we propose a Software Workspace for creating and testing Algorithmic Responses based on Meta-heuristic Experimental design (SWARMED). By designing and pilot testing operationally-inspired, biosystem-based experiments and collecting data from live test populations, our workspace will translate analyzed experimental data into system dynamics and agent based models to develop our algorithms. Additionally, SWARMED will include a software-based, bio-inspired algorithm validation workspace to test, analyze, and demonstrate the new bio-inspired algorithms.