title: Emergence of constraint in self-organizing systems.
abstract: Practitioners of agent-based modeling are often tasked to model or design self-organizing systems while the theoretical foundation of self-organization in science remains to be set. This paper explores self-organization in the context of an agent-based model of ant colony food foraging. We gather specific measures of order-creation and constraint construction particular to leading theories of nonequilibrium thermodynamics that purport to govern self-organizing dynamics. These measures are used to explore three claims: (a) Constraints are constructed from entropy-producing processes in the bootstrapping phase of self-organizing systems; (b) positive feedback loops are critical in the structure formation phase; and (c) constraints tend to decay. The continued presence of far-from-equilibrium boundary conditions are required to reinforce constraints in the maintenance phase.
authors.affiliation: RedfishGroup, 624 Agua Fria Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA. stephen.guerin@redfish.com
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Guerin
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kunkle
mesh_terms: D019277:Entropy; D006801:Humans; D017146:Models, Organizational; D012919:Social Behavior