Flux-density relation for traffic of army ants in a 3-lane bi-directional trail

Abstract

Many ant species form extensive trail systems between the nest and food sources. Previously we have proposed a simple cellular automaton model, based on the asymmetric simple exclusion process, that tries to capture the essential traffic properties of such an ant trail. Here we extend this model to the case of trails of army ants. Army ants often form 3-lane trails where ants move on the outer trails in the opposite direction of those on the inner trail. We find, depending on the model parameters, interesting new features in the fundamental diagrams, e.g. a non-monotonic dependence of the flux on the density for large densities.