Acta Polytechnica Hungarica Vol. 7, No. 2, 2010 – 81 – Swarm Behavior of the Electromagnetics Community as regards Using Swarm Intelligence in their Research Studies Asim Egemen Yilmaz Department of Electronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering Ankara University 06100 Tandogan, Ankara, Turkey e-mail: aeyilmaz@eng.ankara.edu.tr Abstract: Recently, swarm intelligence and its applications have gained much popularity among researchers of various disciplines. The main aim of this study is to investigate the situation for the electromagnetic theory and microwave technology practitioners and try to point to an interesting analogy. Keywords: Swarm intelligence; ant colony optimization; particle swarm optimization; electromagnetic theory; microwave theory 1 Introduction The term “swarm intelligence”, since its introduction by Beni and Wang in 1989 in the context of cellular robotic systems [1], has been a major multidisciplinary attraction center for researchers dealing especially with complex inverse (e.g. design and synthesis) problems. Typically, swarm intelligence systems consist of a population with members having some characteristic behaviors and interacting locally with each other within their environment. In these systems, the members individually behave freely to a certain extent and interact with each other. Even though there is no dictating centralized mechanism, these interactions yield a global behavior which is more organized and directive than that of a stand-alone individual. Today, two main algorithms come to mind when the phrase “swarm intelligence” is mentioned. These are the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) (considered initially in 1992 by Dorigo in his Ph.D. thesis [2], and later formalized by Dorigo et al. in [3]), and the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) (developed by Kennedy and Eberhart in 1995 [4]) methods. Both algorithms were developed by researchers observing the behaviors of animals living as swarms/colonies and being inspired