The Ants' Garden: Complex interactions between populations and the scalability of qualitative models

Ecological theories often explain the behaviour of communities in terms of the underlying interactions that take place between the species that are part of the community. This closely relates to the idea of compositionality within Qualitative Reasoning, in which the model that simulates the behaviour of a larger system is automatically assembled from previously defined elementary units. A recurring question however concerns the viability of this approach, particularly the scalability of such small partial descriptions. In this article we present a fully implemented model and accompanying simulations of the Ants' Garden, a complex system consisting of multiple species with multiple interactions. The Qualitative Reasoning engine automatically assembles these models by reusing a previously created library with partial models of basic processes that govern population behaviour and interactions. The simulations show the typical behaviour of the Ants' Garden as currently known and ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: AICOM
• Authors: Bert Bredeweg, Paulo Salles
• Keywords: AICOM 2005, Ecological Theories, Qualitative Reasoning, Small Partial Descriptions