| Many biological systems exhibit emergent behavior in which swarms of ants, schools of fish and flocks of birds collectively exhibit complex behavior that benefits the group remarkably. Collective behavior in ant colonies is interesting. Ants are individuals which follow simple rules. Yet, when many simple-minded ants interact with each other, they collectively produce rather collective behavior. Some engineers are learning how emergent behavior is created so that they might exploit these features in engineered systems.;In 2003, Couzin and Franks proposed a well regarded mathematical model of ants which produces the results of collective behavior. But, they did not show the steps in how these ants organized. The main focus of this study is to observe how the emergent behavior develops in ants. A computational model has been constructed based on the model developed by Couzin and Franks and we created a simulation of ant behavior to reproduce the results presented in their paper. Based on the observations, it is determined that the time-step used in their simulation is too large. Investigations on the simulations of reduced time revealed that their model is not well posed in terms of noise. Furthermore, the model has been modified in an attempt to improve the simulations and proposes a new way to incorporate noise. |
