ANT: Agent stigmergy-based IoT-network for enhanced tourist mobility

Abstract

In this work, we propose ANT, a network of agents which exchange information in a stigmergy-based fashion. In ANT, each system’s actor distributes pheromones as a way of indicating places’ attractiveness, as well as for building a proper routing path to those sites. The goal of ANT is to improve the chances of discovering points of interest, as well as to reduce the time required for doing so. We have applied ANT to a tourist mobility scenario, where both people and things (events, restaurants, performances, etc.) participate. ANT has achieved notable success in this example case. We find that probability of discovering temporary events and dates improves by more than 35%, while the mean time employed to determine static point decreases by more than a third. We also introduce a mobile-based architecture which performs ANT tasks efficiently and easily for the user.