Analytical and Numerical Investigation of Ant Behavior Under Crowded Conditions

It is often promising to transfer successful concepts from biological to technical domains. Ant Colony Optimisation, which basic principle is based on pheromone attraction of ants on the way from the colony to a food source and back, is a good example for finding reasonable short paths or tours in graphs, e.g. for addressing NP complete problems like the TSP. Ant optimisation has also been applied to the problem of finding routes in the Internet by Caro et al. (1998) in a paper entitled Ant colonies for Adaptive Routing in Packet-switched Communications Networks. Peters et al. (2008) address the issue of load dependend optimisation in their paper entitled Analytical and Numerical Investigation of Ant Behavior Under Crowded Conditions, where they find an ant based approach promising to reduce congetion in the network by optimising routing algorithms.