2017/12/08 by Yahui Sun, Sun, Yahui · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Engineering · #Biocrusts and Microbial Ecology #Emerging Technologies (cs.ET) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Plant and Biological Electrophysiology Studies #Slime Mold and Myxomycetes Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1712.02910
openalex publication_date 2017/12/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The popular Physarum-inspired Algorithms (PAs) have the potential to solve challenging network optimization problems. However, the existing researches on PAs are still immature and far from being fully recognized. A major reason is that these researches have not been well organized so far. In this paper, we aim to address this issue. First, we introduce Physarum and its intelligence from the biological perspective. Then, we summarize and group four types of Physarum-inspired networking models. After that, we analyze the network optimization problems and applications that have been challenged by PAs based on these models. Ultimately, we discuss the existing researches on PAs and identify two fundamental questions: 1) What are the characteristics of Physarum networks? 2) Why can Physarum solve some network optimization problems? Answering these two questions is essential to the future development of Physarum-inspired network optimization.