Many species in nature demonstrate symbiotic relationships leading to emergent behaviors through cooperation, which are sometimes beyond the scope of the partnerships within the same species. These symbiotic relationships are classified as mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism based on the benefit levels involved. While these partnerships are ubiquitous in nature, it is imperative to understand their benefits in designing heterogeneous multi-agent systems. In this work, we validate our hypothesis on the benefits of heterogeneity through a search and rescue problem for different rescuer strategies and heterogeneous group compositions. The heterogeneity informatics obtained from our simulations showed a positive correlation between the heterogeneity measure and the collection speeds demonstrating benefits in most of the scenarios. However, we also found this effect reversing in some cases implying heterogeneity sometimes hampers the group’s abilities.
For more details, please see the poster at Multiagent Heterogeneity Informatics