X-SYCON: Xylem-Inspired Passive Gradient Control for Communication-Free Swarm Response in Dynamic Disaster Environments

TL;DR

X-SYCON introduces a xylem-inspired multi-agent system that passively coordinates in dynamic disaster environments without explicit communication, achieving reliable, scalable swarm responses through emergent field dynamics.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel passive, field-based multi-agent coordination architecture inspired by xylem, demonstrating effective disaster response in communication-denied, dynamic environments.

Findings

Low miss rates and stable throughput in simulations.

Throughput scales sublinearly with team size, reliability improves with more carriers.

Phase stability affected by hazard density but recoverable with increased resources.

Abstract

We present X-SYCON, a xylem-inspired multi-agent architecture in which coordination emerges from passive field dynamics rather than explicit planning or communication. Incidents (demands) and obstructions (hazards) continually write diffusing and decaying scalar fields, and agents greedily ascend a local utility $U=\phi_{\mathrm{DE}}-\kappa\,\phi_{\mathrm{HZ}}$ with light anti-congestion and separation. A beaconing rule triggered on first contact temporarily deepens the local demand sink, accelerating completion without reducing time-to-first-response. Across dynamic, partially blocked simulated environments, we observe low miss rates and stable throughput with interpretable, tunable trade-offs over carrier count, arrival rate, hazard density, and hazard sensitivity $\kappa$. We derive that a characteristic hydraulic length scale $\ell\approx\sqrt{D/\lambda}$ predicts recruitment range in a continuum approximation, and we provide a work-conservation (Ohm-law) bound consistent with sublinear capacity scaling with team size. Empirically: (i) soft hazard penalties yield fewer misses when obstacles already block motion; (ii) throughput saturates sublinearly with carriers while reliability improves sharply; (iii) stronger arrivals can reduce misses by sustaining sinks that recruit help; and (iv) phase-stability regions shrink with hazard density but are recovered by more carriers or higher arrivals. We refer to X-SYCON as an instance of Distributed Passive Computation and Control, and we evaluate it in simulations modeling communication-denied disaster response and other constrained sensing-action regimes.