---
title: "Verifying Emergent Properties of Swarms"
authors:
  - "Panagiotis Kouvaros"
  - "Alessio Lomuscio"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/157"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/0157.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2015
pages: "1083-1088"
track: "Main Track"
keywords:
---

# Verifying Emergent Properties of Swarms

Panagiotis Kouvaros, Alessio Lomuscio

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1083-1088.

## Abstract

We investigate the general problem of establishing whether a swarm satisfies an emergent property. We put forward a formal model for swarms that accounts for their nature of unbounded collections of agents following simple local protocols. We formally define the decision problem of determining whether a swarm satisfies an emergent property. We introduce a sound and complete procedure for solving the problem. We illustrate the technique by applying it to the Beta aggregation algorithm.