To establish the most commonly used routes and paths surrounding a project we integrate the ‘Ant pheromone trail’ models into various areas of computational research.

The idea spawned from the habitual pattern of gathering ants. When leaving the nest in search of food, the ants would leave a pheromone trails for which they could follow back to their nest, regardless of how far they had travelled. 

This method of research is mirrored into the programme when establishing the shortest path between two or more points, by showing the cumulative build up and subsequent evaporation of pheromones - information for which we can utilize to reinforce and accentuate the routes between these points.

Other results obtained from ‘ant’ movement studies can present information linked to the overall footfall of a shop. In other words, every time a shop front is passed by a person, a value is incremented. On the programme this is visualised through colours, and gridding sequences of the various shopfronts, and the total footfall of each shop. Parameters are run for 500 cycles over a grid, each cell having an area of 1 m2.