Abstract
In this paper, we discuss influence of heterogeneity in ant-like colony, i.e., how the ratio of individuals (ants) obeying two different action rules affects the behavior of whole colony. For this purpose, we focus on the foraging task – searching the field for food sources, transporting the food packets to the nest. The two types of ants include what we call hard-working and lazy ants, and we perform statistical analyses to show that moderate existence of the lazy ants would boost efficient food transportation; in particular, we point out that the lazy ants play as explorer of newly emerged food sources, but also as global sensor to capture global information through their local experience, thanks to their moving-around behavior. Based on these observations, we propose a distributed estimation method of global information, i.e., to estimate the global mixture ratio by local encounter frequency with other lazy ants. Finally, we expand the estimation method to distributed control strategy of the global mixture ratio, called on-line switching strategy, where every ant dynamically alternates its obeying rules from the hard-working to the lazy and vice versa, based on its local encounter experience.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Hansell, M.: Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture. Oxford University Press, New York (2009)
Hasegawa, E., Ishii, Y., Tada, K., Kobayashi, K., Yoshimura, J.: Lazy workers are necessary for long-term sustainability in insect societies. Sci. Rep. 6, Article No. 20846 (2016). doi:10.1038/srep20846
Hölldobler, B., Wilson, E.: The Ants. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1990)
Nakamura, M., Kurumatani, K.: A method for designing ant colony models and two examples of its application. In: Capcarrère, M.S., Freitas, A.A., Bentley, P.J., Johnson, C.G., Timmis, J. (eds.) ECAL 2005. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3630, pp. 530–539. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Nakayama, K., Sueoka, Y., Ishikawa, M., Sugimoto, Y., Osuka, K.: Control of transportation trails by distributed autonomous agents inspired by the foraging behavior of ants. Nonlinear Theory Appl. 5(4), 487–498 (2014)
Wehner, R., Müller, M.: The significance of direct sunlight and polarized skylight in the ant’s celestial system of navigation. PNAS 103(33), 12575–12579 (2006)
Wolfram, S.: Cellular Automata and Complexity: Collected Papers. Westview Press, Boulder (1994)
Acknowledgments
This research is partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 15H06360.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sueoka, Y., Nakayama, K., Ishikawa, M., Sugimoto, Y., Osuka, K. (2016). On Heterogeneity in Foraging by Ant-Like Colony: How Local Affects Global and Vice Versa. In: Dorigo, M., et al. Swarm Intelligence. ANTS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9882. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44427-7_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44427-7_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-44426-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-44427-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)