FieldVMC: An Asynchronous Model and Platform for Self-organising Morphogenesis of Artificial Structures

Abstract

In the field of evolutionary computing, the concept of Vascular Morphogenesis Controller (VMC) has been proposed to model the growth of artificial structures over time, stemming from a botanical metaphor of plant morphogenesis. VMC entails a distributed and self-organising protocol where each node in a tree-shaped structure is responsible for distributing resources to its children and collecting success towards its parent.

However, the original VMC model has known limitations: it assumes a tree organisation structure and is implicitly synchronous. These assumptions may induce abstraction gaps when VMC is used to model real-world systems, and limit the applicability of the pattern to engineered morphogenetic systems.

To address these limitations, this work proposes FieldVMC: a generalisation of the VMC model as a field-based computation, in the spirit of the Aggregate Programming paradigm. FieldVMC lifts the synchrony assumption and supports arbitrary network topologies, while preserving the self-organising properties of the original model. The approach is validated through simulation experiments demonstrating self-construction, self-division, self-integration, self-segmentation, and self-optimisation of artificial structures.