Logistics Made Awesome - thanks, ants!

[rhoenix]

[quote="ScienceDaily"]ScienceDaily (Nov. 7, 2009) — A researcher at the University of Granada has designed a new system for the mobility of military troops within a battlefield based on the mechanisms used by ant colonies to move using a commercial video game.

This work, developed at the department of Computer Architecture and Technology of the UGR, has designed several algorithms that permit to look for the best route path (this is, to find the better route to satisfy certain criteria) within a particular environment.

Specifically, this research work has developed a software that would allow the army troops to define the best path within a military battle field, considering that such path will be covered by a company and this must consider the security criteria (reaching their destination with the lower number of casualties) and speed (reaching their destination as quickly as possible).

To that end, the scientists have used the so called 'ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO)', a probabilistic technique used to solve optimization problems and inspired in the behaviors of ants to find trajectories from the colony to the food.

This work has been carried out by Antonio Miguel Mora García, and supervised by professors Juan Julián Merelo Guervós and Pedro Ã