A Novel Model for Bacterial Foraging in Varying Environments

This paper presents the study of modelling bacterial foraging behaviours in varying environments. The purpose of the study is to investigate a novel biologically inspired methodology for complex system modelling and computation, particularly for optimisation of complex dynamic systems, although this paper is mainly concerned with a novel modelling methodology. Our study focuses on the use of individual-based modelling (IbM) method to simulate the activities of bacteria and the evolvement of bacterial colonies. For this study, an architecture and a mathematical framework are designed to model bacterial foraging patterns. Under this architecture, the interactions between the environment and bacteria are investigated. A bacterial chemotaxis algorithm is derived in the framework and simulation studies are undertaken to evaluate this algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can reflect the bacterial behaviours and population evolution in varying environments, and also explore its potential for optimisation of dynamic systems.