Self-organizing nest migration dynamics synthesis for ant colony systems

In this study, we synthesize a novel dynamical approach for ant colonies enabling them to migrate to new nest sites in a self-organizing fashion. In other words, we realize ant colony migration as a self-organizing phenotype-level collective behavior. For this purpose, we first segment the edges of the graph of ants' pathways. Then, each segment, attributed to its own pheromone profile, may host an ant. So, multiple ants may occupy an edge at the same time. Thanks to this segment-wise edge formulation, ants have more selection options in the course of their pathway determination, thereby increasing the diversity of their colony's emergent behaviors. In light of the continuous pheromone dynamics of segments, each edge owns a spatio-temporal piece-wise continuous pheromone profile in which both deposit and evaporation processes are unified. The passive dynamics of the proposed migration mechanism is sufficiently rich so that an ant colony can migrate to the vicinity of a new nest site in a self-organizing manner without any external supervision. In particular, we perform extensive simulations to test our migration dynamics applied to a colony including 500 ants traversing a pathway graph comprising 200 nodes and 4000 edges which are segmented based on various resolutions. The obtained results exhibit the effectiveness of our strategy.