Application of Swarm Intelligence in Business Organizations

We first define the term ‘Swarm Intelligence’ in the context of our project. It is ‘the collective behaviour that emerges from a group of social insects’. In most other contexts, it has a broader definition including the collective behaviour decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial.

While this has been used as a concept for quite some time now, its usage has mostly been restricted to fields of artificial intelligence such as robotics. However, we would like to explore its application in real life business scenarios, an area where it has been applied relatively scarcely so far.

In order to provide a better handle on this concept, we would like to give a few examples of both, Swarm Intelligence and underlying algorithms and heuristics that can possibly be applied. Natural examples include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, fish schooling, etc. Some of the better known algorithms are:

• Optimization based on the actions of an ant colony
• Optimization based on rivers finding almost optimal paths to reach their destinations (Intelligent Water Drops)
• Optimization based on the dynamics of particle swarm comprising of a large number of members

There have already been a few successful attempts by corporations in this regard, notably:

1. Southwest Airlines optimizing the supply chain using Ant Colony Optimization
2. Capital One improving productivity and reducing attrition using principles of Swarm Intelligence, resulting in an attrition rate of 4% when the national average was 20%

We would like to broaden the existing research in this area by developing a theoretical framework for the same and supplementing it with suggestions of real life business organizations. In this project, we intend to follow a two-step process:

1. Identify and classify instances of Swarm Intelligence that can be useful in a business context, followed by looking for business related functional areas where Swarm Intelligence can be applied.
2. Map the business processes identified with the right instance of Swarm Intelligence based heuristic.

-Paroksh Gupta, Roushni Agrawal