These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. This project was written in Python3.
Some requirements have to be installed in order to run the program. Install the requirements with the following command.
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
This will install the packages scipy, matplotlib, Mesa, tqdm, pandas, seaborn and numpy.
Inside the code folder: a full simulation is run by the command:
python3 run.py
This will automatically open up a new window where the simulation is run. Parameters are set in the file run.py. Parameters that can be easily changed are:
- Pheremone strength
- Decay (duration of pheromones)
- Sigma (spread/evaporation)
- Grid size (width and height)
- Number of ants
An environment is made that includes these variables with the following line of code:
env = Environment(width, height, n_colonies, n_ants, n_obstacles, decay, sigma,
moore=False, pheromone_strength)
The model was run several times with varying parameters. For these tests, the file averageruns.py was used. This file can be run with the following command:
python3 averageruns.py
An example of how the plots were made is given in heatmap.ipynb.
Data that was gathered during the project can be found in the 'data' folder. This folder also contains the plots.