Research Of Ant Colony Foraging Simulation And Animation

The flocks and foraging behaviors of birds, fishes and ant colony are interesting and amazing. Inspired from these phenomena, ant colony optimization algorithm, boid model which pioneered the research of crowd simulation and animation, artificial fishes were produced respectively. I am so attracted to these phenomena that different research content and object have similar biologic mechanism. On the basis of analysis and summary of the relevant research home and abroad, my dissertation is about ant colony foraging simulation and animation and my contribution includes:1. Ant colony foraging simulation based on direct interaction between ants is proposed. Direct interaction between ants exists in real world, but is rare seen in ant colony foraging simulations. Inspired from trophallaxies, a way that ants exchange information directly, a direct interaction mechnasim DACF is proposed to be used in ant colony foraging simulation. Then the mechnasim is combined the direct interaction mechanism with the indirect pheromones interaction mechanism. Based on Wilensky's ant colony foraging model and Panait's model, this thesis develops two new models. The simulation results of comparison experiments demonstrate that our new model improves the ability of finding the shortest route in environment with obstacles. Abstracting the principle of the new ant colony foraging simulation model can get a new ant colony optimization framework.2. The research of animation of ant colony foraging with crowd simulation methods is firstly carried out. This model consists of three layers, which together model 2D/3D ant behaviors among static food, obstacle and ant nest. Several search strategies are proposed to represent the interaction rules among ants and the enviroment. Ant colony foraging animation is run in 2D/3D environments separately. Then two LOD methods are used to render ant colony, and Phong illumination model is applied to shade the impostor of ant to get better rendering results.3. A behavior system based on rational decision-making model is proposed to be used in design for games AI. The system is also applied in ant colony foraging simulation. After analysis on the current methods on model creating in games AI, a behavior model for virtual actors is developed. This model is suited for any dynamic scene as well as complicated nonlinear storyline. Thereafter, "real" game environment can be presented to users, where there are real-time interactions with users and the personate intelligent roles. Finally, the advantages of this method are verified by the experiments on the platform of intelligent football competing and Starcraft comprting.