  In this study, we synthesize a novel dynamical approach for ant colonies
enabling them to migrate to new nest sites in a self-organizing fashion. In
other words, we realize ant colony migration as a self-organizing
phenotype-level collective behavior. For this purpose, we first segment the
edges of the graph of ants' pathways. Then, each segment, attributed to its own
pheromone profile, may host an ant. So, multiple ants may occupy an edge at the
same time. Thanks to this segment-wise edge formulation, ants have more
selection options in the course of their pathway determination, thereby
increasing the diversity of their colony's emergent behaviors. In light of the
continuous pheromone dynamics of segments, each edge owns a spatio-temporal
piece-wise continuous pheromone profile in which both deposit and evaporation
processes are unified. The passive dynamics of the proposed migration mechanism
is sufficiently rich so that an ant colony can migrate to the vicinity of a new
nest site in a self-organizing manner without any external supervision. In
particular, we perform extensive simulations to test our migration dynamics
applied to a colony including 500 ants traversing a pathway graph comprising
200 nodes and 4000 edges which are segmented based on various resolutions. The
obtained results exhibit the effectiveness of our strategy.
