Discovering the intrinsic communication topology of systems using ants foraging behavior

Systems can be viewed as collections of interconnected elements that communicate with one another through physical phenomena. The principal focus of this work is the development of distributed algorithms for eliciting the intrinsic communication topology within a physical system and employ them for condition monitoring of the systems. The proposed approach in this paper provides the operators with graphs instead of tables or correlation matrices to identify the presence of a fault and request appropriate actions to mitigate it. Specifically, this paper considers physical systems and the available observations from a foraging perspective and discusses the application of ants foraging behavior techniques to discovery of the intrinsic communication topology of systems based on information-theoretic measures of information flow within systems. The mathematical framework of this approach and the application to an exemplary networked system are presented to illuminate discovery of the intrinsic communication topology.