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SYDNEY, Feb. 13 (360info) Being stuck in traffic can be stressful, waste time and resources and ultimately cost the world economy trillions of dollars a year. Blockages are a daily occurrence and authorities have spent decades trying to fix the problem with little success.
However, the solution may be right under our feet. Ant.
There are an estimated 20 trillion ants on Earth. That’s more stars than there are stars in the Milky Way (and probably more stars than there are stars in the entire observable universe).These ants can live in colonies that contain billions of individuals and can span thousands of kilometers
Almost always moving, but somehow they never get stuck.
Like humans, ants possess complex transport systems to ensure the efficient flow of individuals, resources and information.
Some ant species create systems using chemical signals called pheromones. If an ant finds an attractive food source, it returns to the nest, dropping invisible pheromone droplets behind it as it goes.
This is the basis of many ant transport systems, enabling ants to quickly gather workers to new food sources, assign workers according to the quality of the food, and find the shortest paths between points.
In the early 1990s, the paving behavior of ants inspired the highly successful ant colony optimization algorithm, which is now used to solve difficult transportation problems, such as determining the most efficient route for a delivery fleet. Ants are good at managing traffic on their tracks.
On man-made roads, the average speed of a car decreases as the number of cars on the road increases: when the road is congested, you simply cannot drive fast. However, the ants don’t slow down even as more ants join in.
how? In some cases, traffic jams can be prevented because the ants will use one path when there is low traffic and two paths when there is heavy traffic. By dividing themselves on multiple routes, ants maintain the speed of traffic and prevent congestion, effectively stopping traffic jams before they start.
Some ants also respond to increased traffic by reducing pheromones, which makes paths less attractive and may encourage ants to seek alternative routes. When an ant’s trail becomes crowded, other ants appear to adjust their walking speeds to avoid time-consuming collisions.
Some ants manage traffic by traveling along their paths in small groups called platoons. Queuing is thought to improve the efficiency of ant tracking systems by reducing the gaps between individuals. The concept is being researched for self-driving cars because it reduces the need for sudden braking and helps prevent congestion.
It’s clear that ants are masters at managing traffic along the way, but the billion-dollar question is whether we can apply what we’ve learned from ants to our own traffic management systems.
There’s one problem: Humans are not ants.
Ants on the back road share a common goal, while human drivers are motivated by individual goals that may conflict with other road users. Ants communicate with each other through their footprint systems, whereas communication between human drivers is limited.
However, as we move toward the adoption of self-driving vehicles, the opportunities for ants to inspire transportation technology will increase. Self-driving cars can communicate with each other to find the best route and avoid congestion, similar to how ants use chemical signals to communicate and navigate their path systems.
Like ants in an ant colony, self-driving cars can work together to minimize everyone’s travel time. In essence, our transportation system may become more like ants. As our transportation systems continue to adapt, we’d do well to look to the animals whose traffic management abilities evolved over millions of years. (360info.org)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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