From the Real Ant to the Artificial Ant: Applications in Combinatorial Optimization, Data Clustering, Collective Robotics and Image Processing

Biological studies highlighting the collective behavior of ants in fulfilling various tasks by using their complex indirect communication process have constituted the starting point for many physical systems and various ant colony algorithms. Each ant colony is considered as a superorganism which operates as a unified entity made up of simple agents. These agents ants interact locally with one another and with their environment, particularly in finding the shortest path from the nest to food sources without any centralized control dictating the behavior of individual agents. It is this coordination mechanism that has inspired researchers to develop plenty of metaheuristic algorithms in order to find good solutions for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. In this article, the authors give a biological description of these fascinating insects and their complex indirect communication process. From this rich source of inspiration for researchers, the authors show how, through the real ant, artificial ant is modeled and applied in combinatorial optimization, data clustering, collective robotics, and image processing.