Ant foraging pattern is the foraging cycle of ants in which ants leave their nest to find a food source until an optimal path is found and then convey all of the food to their nest. In computer science and operations research, the ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO) is a probabilistic technique for solving computational problems which can be reduced to finding good paths through graphs.
Ant foraging behaviors are structured by that ways in which food is available. Among all ants, there’s a huge variety of foraging patterns. Some are opportunistic hunter-gatherers, others are nomadic raiders, and some use trunk trails, as in the figure below. These patterns reflect differences in food availability.
The effectiveness of procuring food by any ant colony depends upon the strategies adopted while recruiting the foragers to fetch food and the geometry of paths that these recruited foragers employ for searching and harvesting the food.
