A survey on the routing protocols based on ant-like mobile agents is given. These protocols are often employed in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET). Mobile Ad Hoc Networks are collections of wireless mobile nodes such as PDAs, laptop computers, and cellular phones having wireless communication capability that dynamically form a temporary network without using any existing network infrastructures such as wireless access points. The only infrastructure in MANET is the wireless communication interfaces on the devices. In such a circumstance, where some of the wireless devices are not within wireless range of each other, multi-hop routing is required to transmit messages to the destination. A node that wants to start communication with other nodes that are not within its one-hop wireless transmission range has to request intermediate nodes to forward their communication packets to the destination. In this paper, we survey a variety of proposed network protocols to accommodate this situation. We focus especially on biologically-inspired routing algorithms that are based on the ant colony optimization algorithm.

In this paper, we propose an evacuation support system that provides evacuation routes in case of disasters, and verify the usefulness of the system. Current popular wireless communication infrastructure is supported by a series of base stations and one base station handles a lot of communication. Therefore, when communication base stations break down due to disasters such as an earthquake, it may become difficult for people to use their smartphones based on the Internet. When the communication infrastructure is paralyzed, people will have great difficulty collecting information about the conditions of transportation systems and about the safety of family and friends using smartphones. Our proposed system addresses this problem by using multiple kinds of mobile agents in addition to static agents on smartphones that use a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). The proposed system collects information with mobile agents and diffuses information via mobile agents so that the system is able to provide an optimized evacuation route for each user in a dynamically changing disaster environment. In this paper, we extend our previously proposed evacuation support system to consider elevation information when constructing evacuation routes. When a tsunami or a flood tide occurs, low elevations may be under water. Therefore, this revised evacuation support system helps people to move to safer places by selecting higher elevation routes when warranted by the situation.

Route selection is one of the most important problems for a car navigation system. Given a pair of origin and destination, there are many possible routes. Most current car navigation systems propose the shortest path from the origin to the destination. Selecting the shortest path is not a hard problem, but the shortest path is not always what the user wants; what the user really wants to have is the most comfortable route for him or her to drive. In other words, the driver wants to have a car navigation system to propose the subjectively optimal route for him or her. Finding such a route requires enumerating all the possible routes, and is known as a NP-hard problem. In order to reduce computational complexity, we have employed a GA to find a (subjectively) quasi optimal route for the driver. In this paper, we report our attempt to integrate uncomfortable-turns in to the conditions of our GA-based route selection algorithm. The numerical experiments demonstrate the feasibility of our GA-based route selection method.