Swarm Architecture

A family of multi-agent architectures in which global behavior emerges from interactions among units that follow local rules, exchange signals, and adjust their behavior without relying on a central planner for every decision. Coordination may use a shared environment, peer messages, or consensus mechanisms.

The label is used loosely in agent products. A set of workers controlled by a supervisor remains centralized and does not acquire swarm properties merely by having many agents. A serious implementation must define the protocol, state ownership, duplicate-work prevention, convergence, stopping conditions, and budget; emergent behavior without those boundaries also creates collisions and unpredictable cost.