Slime Mould Imitation of Belgian Transport Networks: Redundancy, Bio-Essential Motorways, and Dissolution
Andrew Adamatzky, Bernard De Baets and Wesley Van Diesel
Belgium is amongst few artificial countries, established on purpose, when Dutch and French speaking parts were joined in a single unit. This makes Belgium a particularly interesting testbed for studying bioinspired techniques for simulation and analysis of vehicular transport networks. We imitate growth and formation of a transport network between major urban areas in Belgium using the a cellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum.We represent the urban areas with the sources of nutrients. The slime mould spans the sources of nutrients with a network of protoplasmic tubes. The protoplasmic tubes represent the motorways. In an experimental laboratory analysis we compare the motorway network approximated by P. polycephalum and the man-made motorway network of Belgium. We evaluate the efficiency of the slime mould network and the motorway network using proximity graphs.
Keywords: Transport networks, unconventional computing, slime mould