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Bees Top the Supply Chain Colony Optimisation for Management | |
Bees Top the Supply Chain
Info Week has a short, but interesting article about IBM's latest focus -- Think They'll Start Spelling It Supply 'ChAIn'? Essentially, the company aims to conquer another lucrative market, that of supply chain management. So what does this have to do with bees? It was only a hint in the original article, but I presume colony based optimisation is used. This essentially models lots of agents (usually ants, but bees in this case), that move around more or less randomly in the search space. With ants, the pheromone trails each ant leaves behind slowly builds up, and tends to provide good solutions to problems (via positive feedback). The field is quite recent, and known as ant systems. Though I've only seen it applied well to graph like problems, this is definitely something to watch out for! |
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