Control of transportation trails by distributed autonomous agents inspired by the foraging behavior of ants

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss some phenomena of distributed transportation inspired by the foraging behavior of ants, in the light of space-discretization (or cellular automata) approach. We define fundamental event rules in a cellular world, and introduce two types of ant agents: one is an oriented ant, which perceives pheromones; the other is a random ant, which does not perceive pheromones. We then take a closer look at the number of pheromone trails formed by homogeneous and heterogeneous agents. Moreover, we propose a distributed control method for the number of formed pheromone trails, and examine the effectiveness of the proposed method in several simulations.