Program

Ants in search of food leave behind scents called pheromones that help other ants find the shortest path to the food source.

This collective intelligence of ant colonies is now providing a way to distribute traffic more evenly throughout a city’s network of streets and to enable individual motorists to select an optimal route. Serving as the “digital pheromones” are flows of data based on current calculations of the time needed to traverse segments of the network. This information is then fed into a constantly-updated virtual street map.

Siemens Corporate Technology in cooperation with Johannes Kepler University of Linz: Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik – Software Engineering, Institut für Pervasive Computing and Ars Electronica Futurelab. Siemens Corporate Technology: Dieter Kolb, Reiner Müller, Dr. Jan Wieghardt; University of Linz: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Gustav Pomberger, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Alois Ferscha, Dr.Wolfgang Narzt, Oliver Seimel, Ursula Wilfingseder; Ars Electronica Futurelab: Horst Hörtner, Roland Haring, Christopher Lindinger, Karl Schmidinger, Leonhardt Immervoll, Matthias Petzold; Kindly supported by: Reinhold Achatz, Klaus Beetz