Exploiting Physarum-Inspired Vacant Particle Transport Model to Redesign an Enterprise Network

Physarum can form a robust network while foraging, which is viewed as a result of microscopic response diffusion followed by a macroscopic spontaneous boundary modification. The vacant-particle transport model apprehends the microscopic-macroscopic responding skills of Physarum to develop a transport mechanism with balanced exploration and exploitation. An existing enterprise network (EN) can be viewed as a set of clusters linking various users, which is analogous to Physarum’s nutrition-network that connects a variety of food sources. We propose a redesign process, which explores EN clusters and decides how to exploit them to manage dynamic workloads, as Physarum reforms its network through explore-exploit skills to manage energy for its survival. In this paper, we formulate the redesign process as a two-step optimization problem with an objective function to maximize the managing of workloads at the backbone; here, the ‘move user’ operation derived from the basic vacant particle model forms the microscopic optimization and the restructuring of EN clusters through evolution forms the macroscopic optimization. A mathematical model with added constraints is developed to expedite the optimization process. The experimental findings demonstrated that the proposed approach reduces the backbone workloads by 39% compared to the initial.