A new model of foraging behavior in ant system

Foraging behavior in ant colonies has come to be viewed as a prototypical example to describe how complex group behavior can arise from simple individuals. In order to research the feature of self-organization in swarm intelligence (SI), a mean field model is given and analyzed in foraging process with three sources in this paper. The distance of trails and the richness of each source are considered. Both of the theoretical numerical analysis and Monte Carlo simulation show the power law relationship between the completion time and the flux of foragers. The work presented here guides a better understanding on self-organization and swarm intelligence. It can be used to design more efficient, adaptive, and reliable intelligent systems.