Performance Analysis of Collective Adaptive Behaviour in Time and Space

Many systems, both natural and engineered, exhibit collective adaptive behaviour. Natural examples are swarming animals and insects, and man-made examples include swarm robots and sensor networks. Indeed many systems have both human and ICT-based agents in play, distributed over some geographical region: an informatics environment as defined by Milner. Over recent years there has been increased interest in modelling these systems in order to understand their dynamic behaviour. Here we consider the subsequent issue of how to define useful performance measures for such systems, based on consideration of a simple, intuitive example.