2006/06/07 by Katsuhiro Nishinari, Ken Sugawara, Toshiya Kazama +2 · 1 citation
Engineering · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Aerospace engineering #Ant colony #Ant colony optimization algorithms #Artificial intelligence #Biology #Computer science #Ecology #Engineering #Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics #Foraging #Generalization #Mathematics #Pedestrian #Range (aeronautics) #Robot #Simulation #Traffic control and management #Transport engineering #Transportation Planning and Optimization #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.physa.2006.05.016
published as Physica A vol.372 (2006) pp.132-141 · 15 pages, 11 Postscript figures, uses elsart.cls
openalex publication_date 2006/06/07 · arxiv created 2007/02/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Models for the behavior of ants and pedestrians are studied in an unified way in this paper. Each ant follows pheromone put by preceding ants, hence creating a trail on the ground, while pedestrians also try to follow others in a crowd for efficient and safe walking. These following behaviors are incorporated in our stochastic models by using only local update rules for computational efficiency. It is demonstrated that the ant trail model shows an unusual non-monotonic dependence of the average speed of the ants on their density, which can be well analyzed by the zero-range process. We also show that this anomalous behavior is clearly observed in an experiment of multiple robots. Next, the relation between the ant trail model and the floor field model for studying evacuation dynamics of pedestrians is discussed. The latter is regarded as a two-dimensional generalization of the ant trail model, where the pheromone is replaced by footprints.