Deviated Trail-Laying Behavior Stemmed from Directional Interaction (#647)
Foraging ants use chemical pheromones for recruiting their nest-mates. If agents simply obey this information absolutely, the balance between exploitation and exploration appears to be never achieved. However, actual foragers seem to maintain this balance on individual level. Desert ants appear to achieve deviated movements when their outbound foraging by using visual landmarks combined with path integration (Bolek & Wolf, 2015). These deviated movements might encourage agents to explore near sites while exploiting experienced food sites. Chemical pheromones as social information wouldn't offer agents concrete directional information. Rather, ambiguous directions can be produced if agents consider global properties of chemical information. In this paper therefore we assume that agents in our model consider the relationship between chemical information and moving information of others as concrete directional information. We developed a multi-agent model in which agents reacted to chemical pheromones or directional information of local others in order to form trail-laying behaviors as social swarms. Agents in our model adopted one strategy (pheromones or directions) and switched these two strategies. Switching behaviors are dependent on environmental contexts. Agents showed curvatures while moving forward as a result. However, this simple switching model couldn't explain deviated route-choices when agents were forced to explore binary-branch routes. We showed that agents needed to change their reaction-rules by considering the relationship of these different strategies while distinguishing one from the other.