Polyethism in a colony of artificial ants

TL;DR

This paper investigates self-organizing role assignment strategies in artificial ant colonies inspired by eusocial insects, focusing on polyethism mechanisms to enhance foraging efficiency in dynamic environments.

Contribution

It introduces models of caste and age polyethism for artificial agents, evaluating their impact on foraging performance in changing conditions.

Findings

Polyethism improves foraging efficiency in dynamic environments.

Age polyethism adapts better to environmental changes.

Caste polyethism offers stable role distribution.

Abstract

We explore self-organizing strategies for role assignment in a foraging task carried out by a colony of artificial agents. Our strategies are inspired by various mechanisms of division of labor (polyethism) observed in eusocial insects like ants, termites, or bees. Specifically we instantiate models of caste polyethism and age or temporal polyethism to evaluated the benefits to foraging in a dynamic environment. Our experiment is directly related to the exploration/exploitation trade of in machine learning.