Modelling of self-driven particles: foraging ants and pedestrians

Abstract

Models for the behavior of ants and pedestrians are studied in a unified way in this paper. Each ant follows pheromone put by preceding ants, hence creating a trail on the ground, while pedestrians also try to follow others in a crowd for efficient and safe walking. These following behaviors are incorporated in our stochastic models by using only local update rules for computational efficiency. It is demonstrated that the ant trail model shows a unusual non-monotonic dependence of the average speed of the ants on their density, which can be well analyzed by the zero-range process. We also show that this anomalous behavior is clearly observed in an experiment of multiple robots. Next, the relation between the ant trail model and the floor field model for studying evacuation dynamics of pedestrians is discussed. The latter is regarded as a two-dimensional generalization of the ant trail model, where the pheromone is replaced by footprints. It is shown from simulations that small perturbations to pedestrians will sometimes avoid congestion and hence allow safe evacuation.