Modeling ant foraging: a chemotaxis approach with pheromones and trail formation

Abstract

We consider a continuous mathematical description of a population of ants and simulate numerically their foraging behavior using a system of partial differential equations of chemotaxis type. We show that this system accurately reproduces observed foraging behavior, especially spontaneous trail formation and efficient removal of food sources. We show through numerical experiments that trail formation is correlated with efficient food removal. Our results illustrate the emergence of trail formation from simple modeling principles.

References in corpus (2)

• Trafficlike collective movement of ants on trails: absence of jammed phase
• Trail formation based on directed pheromone deposition

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Free energy of a chemotactic model with nonlinear diffusion
• Kinetic and macroscopic models for active particles exploring complex environments with an internal navigation control system
• Modeling tropotaxis in ant colonies: recruitment and trail formation
• Mathematical models for chemotaxis and their applications in self-organisation phenomena