Self-organized traffic via priority rules in leaf-cutting ants

Ants, termites and humans often form well-organized and highly efficient trails between different locations. Yet the microscopic traffic rules responsible for this organization and efficiency are not fully understood. In previous experimental studies with leaf-cutting ants (Atta colombica), a set of local priority rules were isolated and it was proposed that these rules govern the temporal and spatial organization of the traffic on the trails. Here we introduce a model based on these priority rules to investigate whether they are sufficient to produce traffic similar to that observed in the experiments on both a narrow and a wider trail. We establish that the model is able to reproduce key characteristics of the traffic on the trails. In particular, we show that the proposed priority rules induce de-synchronization into clusters of inbound and outbound ants on a narrow trail, and that priority-type dependent segregated traffic emerges on a wider trail. Due to the generic nature of the proposed priority rules we speculate that they may be used to model traffic organization in a variety of other ant species.

Title	Self-organized traffic via priority rules in leaf-cutting ants
Creator	Strömbom, Daniel
Creator	Dussutour, A.
Publisher	PLoS Computational Biology
Academic Department	Biology
Division	Natural Sciences
Organization	Lafayette College
Date Issued	October 2018
Date Available	2019-12-02
Type	Article
Language	English
Bibliographic Citation	Strömbom, D. and A. Dussutour (2018 Oct) "Self-organized traffic via priority rules in leaf-cutting ants." PLoS Computational Biology 14 (10): e1006523.
Standard Identifier	Handle 10385/2z10wq71w
Standard Identifier	DOI 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006523
Permalink	http://hdl.handle.net/10385/2z10wq71w
Rights Statement	Creative Commons - Attribution
Rights Holders	Strömbom, Daniel
Rights Holders	Dussutour, A.