  The relationship between division of labor and individuals' spatial behavior
in social insect colonies provides a useful context to study how social
interactions influence the spreading of agent (which could be information or
virus) across distributed agent systems. In social insect colonies, spatial
heterogeneity associated with variations of individual task roles, affects
social contacts, and thus the way in which agent moves through social contact
networks. We used an Agent Based Model (ABM) to mimic three realistic scenarios
of agent spreading in social insect colonies. Our model suggests that
individuals within a specific task interact more with consequences that agent
could potentially spread rapidly within that group, while agent spreads slower
between task groups. Our simulations show a strong linear relationship between
the degree of spatial heterogeneity and social contact rates, and that the
spreading dynamics of agents follow a modified nonlinear logistic growth model
with varied transmission rates for different scenarios. Our work provides an
important insights on the dual-functionality of physical contacts. This
dual-functionality is often driven via variations of individual spatial
behavior, and can have both inhibiting and facilitating effects on agent
transmission rates depending on environment. The results from our proposed
model not only provide important insights on mechanisms that generate spatial
heterogeneity, but also deepen our understanding of how social insect colonies
balance the benefit and cost of physical contacts on the agents' transmission
under varied environmental conditions.
