I've thought about insect traffic jams myself on occasion. From my limited
observations of ant columns, their trick is to locally raise the route
capacity by clambering over the top of each other. Sort of somewhere
between 2- and 3-D.
--
Jonathan Harrington
Forest Research
Private Bag 3020
Rotorua 3201
New Zealand
ph: +64 7 343 5532
fax +64 7 343 5507
email: [log in to unmask]
Dr Peter Zioupos
<[log in to unmask] To: [log in to unmask]
ELD.AC.UK> cc:
Sent by: Engineers Subject: Re: Newby
and biologists
mechanical design
list
<BIOMIMETICS@JISCMAI
L.AC.UK>
07/02/2003 00:40
Please respond to
Engineers and
biologists
mechanical design
list
Thonie
I was just thinking about the dimensional aspects of your question:
ants would offer a better example for managing road-traffic because the
problem is two-dimensional,
bee-hibes may be more relevant to air-traffic control situations?
regards
Peter Zioupos
Cranfield University
> Hi all,
>
> Hopefully I pickecd the right list - I'm research engineer who's
> background is in theorectical biology and bioinformatics. I'm very
> interested in what's sometimes called "biological inspired technologies"
> and I'm trying to use biological principles as main inspiration while
> tackling technological challenges (related to areas like crisis
> management, traffic management, decision support,"intelligent" systems,
> etc). Currently we are working on the application of self-organisation
> concepts in (at least) the context of traffic management. One aspect
> we've looked at is swarm-intelligence and we are excited about possible
> applications. Besides that I'm looking for good references about colony
> behavior of social insects escpecially related to in-hive behavior (I'm
> hoping to find possible clues here about natural "traffic-jams"). Any
> help or hints are greatly appreciated!!
>
> regards,
>
> Thonie van Lieburg, M.Sc.
> TNO Physics and Electronics Laboratory
> group Command&Control
> Netherlands
> www.tno.nl,[log in to unmask]
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