Digital Ants, A Versatile Natural Model for Applications in Computing

Digital ants have found applications in both decision and optimization problems as well as other computational problems.

Marco Dorigo has used ants to develop an algorithm for the Traveling Sales Person Problem. Zhuang has used ant technology to better define edges between image points for machine vision systems. Fink has identified swarm technology, based on digital ants, as a means of determining a trust based network security system.

The Biological Motivation

Throughout the world Ants have successfully colonized nearly every continent. Ants are a large collection of simple individual insects living in organized colonies that adapt to and overcome very difficult problems. Ants are capable of changing their environment, defending their colonies, and hunting for and/or collecting food. They achieve their success through cooperation and communication working for a common goal. Ant colonies are organized with with a hierarchal structure. Individual ants are self directed but perform actions based on their role and communication through pheromones.

Ants and TSP

The fact that ants are capable of determining the shortest path by chance without knowledge of route and obstacles is the basis for their application in the Traveling Sales Person route optimization problem. Pheromone deposition in relation to time is the means that a shortest path is selected by individuals within the group.

Ant TSP Operation

The primary behaviors that are assumed for the digital ants are:

1. Preference for paths with high pheromone level. 2. A higher rate of growth of the amount of pheromone on shorter paths. 3. Trail mediated communication among ants. 4. The ant is enhanced with memory, giving it the ability to reference cities already visited. 5. The ability to calculate the distance to cities.

All of the digital ants deposit pheromones at the same rate over a certain time unit and are able to deposit pheromones over a shorter route more quickly than over longer routes. The ant TSP can also be coupled to a particular heuristic for increased performance.

Ant TSP Operation

The ant is the agent that moves from city to city on a TSP graph. A population of individual ants is deposited at particular cities on the TSP graph. An individual ant beginning at a city selects a city to move to based on a probabilistic formula with the constraint that the city has not been previously visited. The probabilistic formula also considers the pheromone amount on a particular edge between cities as well as an heuristic function, This serves to balance distance and pheromone importance. Ants traverse edges to particular cities depositing pheromones based time and each routes pheromone level is updated. This results in shorter routes to hold a larger pheromone value, which due to the bias of the digital ant continues to reinforce the route. Based on the digital ants bias for shorter routes and higher pheromone values the population of individual ants select the shortest overall traversal. While at the same time longer, less optimal routes, pheromone levels decrease in time and the route dies off.

Ant TSP Results

Using the digital ant TSP model Dorigo found that the ant model '...finds results which are at least as good as, and often better than, those found by other models. On large data sets the ant model was slightly modified to ''incorporate a more advanced data structure known as a candidate list, a data structure normally used when trying to solve big TSP problems. Using the ant TSP model for the larger data sets use of the candidate list showed improvement in both results and CPU performance. When using the ant TSP model on asymmetric TSP problems, specifically the well known, 43 city asymmetric problem called 43X2, the ant TSP found the optimal solution in 220 seconds while the same problem could not be solved to optimality with less than 32 hours of computation on a workstation by the best published code available However the ant model did not out perform other specialized heuristic's such as Lin-Kernighan when applied to symmetric TSP problems.

Edge Extraction for Machine Vision

In digital imaging or processing the edges between features define the border between represented objects. A feature edge is the point where color or intensity change drastically to define the point where the feature changes from one object to another. In digital images this edge is represented in pixels. The intensity of a particular pixel in relation to its neighboring pixels is the basis for edge definition in the image.

According to Zhuang, Feature extraction is the important basis for image analysis and machine vision.'

Ant Edge Extraction Operation

A digital image is the environment that individual ants act upon to configure the image based on pixels connection information. Use of ants in image construction requires a perceptual graph that represent the connection of neighboring points, which is a weighted graph defined on the grid of pixels in the digital image. A value or weight is assigned to each pixel based on its neighbors which reside up, down, left, and right to a particular pixel within the image. The weight or connection to neighboring pixels reflect the intensity of connection between the neighboring points. In areas with similar gray scale values, non edge areas, the connection weight is low while areas with dis-similar gray scale values, edge areas, the connection weight is high. As the ants traverse the image during individual iterations these weights are used as the pheromone signal that act to attract individuals and reinforce the weight simulating the dispersal of pheromones that will act to attract more ants on the next iteration. The end effect is that the ants reinforce the edge of object boundaries and extract the edge definition from the image.

Ant Edge Extraction Results

Here are the resulting images from the application of digital ant edge extraction from Zhuang's original publication. The resulting images are a visual representation of each pixels numeric relationship or connections to its four connected neighboring pixels. Clearly the edges from the image have been successfully extracted.

Hierarchal Structure for Network Security and Policy

Today computer networks have grown large and are often a collection of numerous sub-networks bridged across the Internet and between multiple organizations. Often these networks are not managed by a single policy or organization. Not all network users, due to sensitivity of data or legal requirements, have full network access. This includes network administrators. A hierarchal structure based on digital ants and ant colony structure has been identified as a means of applying a management policy for large heterogeneous computer networks. They are capable of detecting and taking corrective action during network attacks with minimal human intervention. The goal of this approach is to maintain human supervision driving decisions based on policy and need at the correct level of intervention during network attacks. This structure provides reliable and near real-time trusted input from the system.

Architecture

4 hierarchical levels with a human or Supervisor at the top level. First large interconnected networks are divided into logical units known as enclaves. Enclaves are a set of computer networking hardware and software owned by a single organization and administrated under a unified policy by a single (possibly separate) organization.'' Enclaves can be very small to very large. Each enclave is the largest unit over which an automated system can be fielded without violating the rights of or policies of a system owner. Each enclave is managed at the highest level by a human supervisor. Supervisors can manage more than one enclave. Supervisors are required to make corrective decisions only in extreme cases.

Architecture

The level below the Supervisor is the enclave-level agent, known as the Sergeant. Sergeants are the highest level software component. They oversee security over their entire enclave as defined by the supervisor. Agents are the only software component that interacts with the supervisor. Agents are capable of making service agreements with other enclaves. They oversee the next lower level software component.

Architecture
Sentinels are at the next lower levelagent, residing at the host level within the enclave. Sentinels are responsible for protecting and configuring a single host or a collection of identical hosts such as a cluster. They implement the policies as they are defined by their Sergent. They manage the next level of agents below themselves the Sensors. Sensors are the lowest level, most numerous, and lightest software component. They move freely from machine to machine within the enclave. Sensors are specialized agents capable of detecting a single type of problem. There are multiple types of Sensor, each specialized to detect a specific problem. They detect and report any detected problems to its supervising Sentinel.

Operation

The operation of this system is modeled on food as reward concept for Sensors. As Sensors roam the enclave they search for the particular conditions that they are programmed to detect. After detecting an issue they report back to their supervising Sentinel and request to be fed. The Sentinel assesses the information and determines a quantity to feed the Sensor based on its judgment of the information quality. Feeding a Sensor attracts other Sensors, of different types, that provide additional details regarding issues they have detected. This combined with information from other Sensors provide a more complete description of a problem that is occurring. After being fed Sensors will leave a digital pheromone as it roams to other machines on the network that include information on the host location where it was fed. This pheromone trial leads other Sensors to the Sentinel to provide information for food.

Operation

Information collected by the Sentinel is used to take corrective action. This information and any action taken by the Sentinel is reported to the responsible Sergeant. The report to the Sergeant will contain the classifiers used by the Sensor that helped diagnose the problem and any other evidence that may be useful in building new more specific classifiers. The Sergeant will build new Sensors using the more specific classifiers and release them into the enclave to assist in the defense of the attack. The Sergeant is responsible for notifying the Supervisor with all of the details of the detected attack. It details information regarding Sensors, actions taken by Sentinels, and the current state. The supervisor can directly modify or define classifiers for the Sergeant to use in new sensors. Supervisor can allow the Sergeant to share or not share information regarding the attack with other enclaves.

Questions?