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Fungi as Metaphors for Resource Management

Authors:
Eilidh McAdam
Ruth Falconer
James Bown
John Crawford

Keywords: adaptive systems; critical infrastructure; biological metaphors.

Abstract:
Modern societies are heavily dependent upon a number of critical infrastructure networks that allow our societies to function, including water, power and transportation. These networks are open to failure through a range of processes including shortage of essential resources, breakdowns at key nodes and surges in demand and this means that effective management of such networks is challenging. The fungi, an entire kingdom of life, epitomise successful networks in nature, demonstrating pervasive growth in harsh environments and a capacity to optimise resource distribution in space over time. We detail a graph-based implementation of an established model of fungal colony growth and recycling that provides a scheme for efficient resource allocation and distribution. Local processes of uptake of resource, growth and biomass recycling lead to non-local emergent patterns of biomass distribution and colony functioning. This colony growth and recycling in response to changes in resource supply leads to highly flexible spatio-temporal resource balancing in the natural world. In our simulations, we identify fungal colonies that have genotypes that maximise throughput from prescribed sources to sinks in a spatial environment, and provide a biological interpretation to reveal the link between the observed macro-scale pattern and the micro-scale processes that effect a given solution. This interpretation is then contextualised in the domain of critical infrastructure management.

Pages: 20 to 24

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: September 25, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4146

ISBN: 978-1-61208-156-4

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from September 25, 2011 to September 30, 2011