Ant Foraging By Liviu Panait

This is a simulation of artificial ants foraging from a nest, discovering a food source in the face of obstacles, and then establishing a trail between the nest and food source. The model uses two pheromones which set up gradients to the nest and to the food source respectively. The pheromones evaporate as well. You can change some of these constants.

A two-pheromone model is likely not biological, but this model is based on a series of papers we did showing a strong relationship between ant pheromone algorithms and dynamic programming.

• http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/papers/panait04pheromone.pdf
  A Pheromone-Based Utility Model for Collaborative Foraging. Liviu Panait and Sean Luke. In AAMAS 2004.
• http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/papers/panait04ant.pdf
  Ant Foraging Revisited. Liviu Panait and Sean Luke. In ALIFE 9.
• http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/papers/panait04learning.pdf
  Learning Ant Foraging Behaviors. Liviu and Sean Luke. In ALIFE 9.

For more papers, see the EC Lab website.