Modeling ant colony foraging in dynamic and confined environment

  • Authors:

  • Elton Bernardo Bandeira de Melo;Aluízio Fausto Ribeiro Araújo

  • Affiliations:

  • Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil;Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The collective foraging behavior of ants is an example of self-organization and adaptation arising from the superposition of simple individual behavior. With the objective of understanding and modeling such interactions, experiments with the Argentine ants Linepithema humile were conducted into a relatively complex, artificial network. This consisted of interconnected branches and bifurcations, where the ants have to choose among fourteen different paths in order to reach a food source, and the branches can be blocked or unblocked at any time. Due mainly to stagnation problems, previous models did not accurately reproduce the behavior of ants in a changing environment. In this paper, a new model (ACF-DCM) is proposed, based on ACO principles and biological studies of insects. ACF-DCM succeeded in reproducing the behavior of ants in a confined and dynamic environment.