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A survey of biological collaboration models

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Abstract

Collaboration has been widely studied throughout multiple disciplines, and it has been applied to a broad range of fields. In collaboration games, players’ strategies are the main influence on the final rewards or payoffs. In the field of biology, the phenomena of collaboration in coalition formation and in foraging have encouraged researchers to make great efforts in studying them. Quantitative models have been developed to include the biological complexities and behaviors of natural creatures and also to identify and predict the optimal strategies for them. Also, the models are applied in other fields, such as those (e.g., wireless sensor and robot networks) in the engineering realm. The purpose of this paper is to introduce and discuss those models, to gain inspiration from the modeling methods and analysis methods, to introduce the applications of the models in engineering, and to propose research directions in collaboration with presenting problems as examples that may be potentially solved with bio-inspired solutions. This paper surveys the quantitative models, including the assumptions in the models, modeling methods, and analysis methods as well as other studies that focus on the mechanism of the evolution of cooperation in nature systems.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported in part by The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), under grants: CNS-0716211, CCF-0829827, CNS-0737325, and CNS-1059265. This work is supported in part by the National Fundamental Research 973 Program of China under 2010CB334705.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487-0290, USA

    Xiannuan Liang & Yang Xiao

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Correspondence to Yang Xiao.

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Liang, X., Xiao, Y. A survey of biological collaboration models. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 5, 551–563 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-012-0164-5

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