Simulating collective intelligence of bio-inspired competing agents

• Modeling a stochastic multi-species prey–predator artificial ecosystem with two levels of food chain.
• Investigating the influence of energy flow on the ecosystem lifetime.
• Defining energy variables as functions of behaviors.
• Analyzing model on 11,000 simulations by a Cox univariate analysis and a hazard function.
• Results match the behaviors of real ecosystems.

In this paper, a comprehensive model is introduced to investigate the influence of energy flow on the lifetime of stochastic multi-species prey–predator artificial ecosystems. The model consists of a non-stationary hosting environment with food sources and a few species of competing herbivore and carnivore birds that can perform several individual and collective behaviors such as flocking, breeding, competing, resting, hunting, escaping, seeking, and foraging. The experimental results of 11,000 simulations analyzed by Cox univariate analysis and hazard function suggest that only a fraction of associated energy variables and pairwise interactions between them influence the lifetime. The proposed stochastic model can be utilized to simulate the complex multi-agent systems and their emergent behavior. Also, the proposed statistical analysis of energy flow to estimate the system stability and lifetime can be generalized to other physical and economical complex systems.