William Atkins
Tuesday, 18 November 2008 20:47
Science -
Energy
Page 2 of 3
Analyzing their movements, the Helbing team found that the less-wide path soon became overcrowded as the ants went back and forth between the nest and the food.
However, ants returning from the sugar syrup to the nest, after having encountered the traffic snarl, told the ants just heading out from the nest to the food what had happened.
The returning ants pushed the starting-out ants into the wider path, thus avoiding the traffic congestion in the narrower path.
Then the returning ants did not encounter the traffic mess in the narrow path, they did not bump into the other ants and try to change their path.
The team writes,
“The related results suggest new ways of congestion control and simple algorithms for optimal resource usage based on local interactions and, therefore, decentralized control concepts.”
Their abstract continues to state,
“Here, we present a mathematical analysis of such a concept for an experiment with two alternative ways with limited capacities between a food source and the nest of an ant colony. Moreover, we carry out microscopic computer simulations for generalized setups, in which ants have more alternatives or the alternative ways are of different lengths.”
“In this way and by variation of interaction parameters, we can get a better idea, how powerful congestion control based on local repulsive interactions may be. Finally, we will discuss potential applications of this design principle to routing in traffic or data networks and machine usage in supply systems.”
Page three concludes.
