Simulating multiple emergent phenomena exemplified in an ant colony (poster)

Modeling the activity of an ant community based on the individual behavior of a single ant is a very modern approach, but until now the modeling has often been restricted to single phenomenon, e.g. foraging or recruiting. But these activities can not be seen independently from other necessary abilities. For example foraging, breeding, building a nest or defending a territory from enemies are all dependent on each other. In this paper we want to present a model of an ant community that unifies different activities during a complete life cycle of a colony. We present experiments with a simulated ant colony that exhibits concurrently - foraging and recruiting - storing energy and distributing it inside of the anthill - breeding and individual development - mass recruitment for defending the colony’s territory For modeling the behavior of an ant we use the SeSAm-architecture. This is a discrete, rule-based multi-agent simulation system that allows easy graphical modeling. Because of its simple structure and powerful graphical editors the large, unifying ant-model is easily accessible.