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To plan the urban traffic path using the ant colony algorithm, the composition and functional division of the mobile robot are analyzed. The TSP (Traveling Salesman Problem) is used to deeply understand the traditional ant colony algorithm. Then, based on this, the improvement scheme of the traditional ant colony algorithm is analyzed. The results showed that the artificial potential field method and the A* algorithm improved the performance of the ant colony algorithm. At the initial stage of the search path, the blindness and randomness of the ant colony algorithm due to insufficient pheromone concentration in each path were solved. The local optimal path is avoided with the development of algorithm iteration. Therefore, the improved ant colony algorithm is superior to the traditional ant colony algorithm.

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a sociology that focuses on the everyday world as problematic. As a theory/method of discovery, it focuses on how the work people do is organized and coordinated by text-mediated and text-regulated social organization. Actor-network Theory (ANT) is a theory/method that is concerned with how realities get enacted. ANT focuses on a multiplicity of human and nonhuman actors (e.g., computers, documents, and laboratory equipment) and how the relations between them are constituted and how they are made to hang together to create certain realities. In this chapter, we discuss some of the similarities and differences between IE and ANT. We begin with an overview of IE and ANT and focus on their ontological and epistemological “shifts.” We then discuss some of the similarities and differences between IE and ANT, particularly from an IE stance. In doing so, we put these approaches into dialog and allude to some of the potential benefits and pitfalls of combining these approaches.

In this chapter we explore the relationship between current gendered practices and past conditions through the lens of actor-network theory (ANT). In particular we are interested in the viability of ANT as a lens for studying the past and in ways that can be reconciled with feminist thought. We argue that although there is some nonresonance between ANT and feminist theorizing, using ANT in a critically historicist way allows some of the barriers between ANT and feminism to be broken down. We synthesize an approach to study gendered organizational processes that exist in and over time, identifying and surfacing some of the actants (i.e., human and material factors that encourage people to act) that work together within networks to produce gendered effects such as ongoing discriminatory practices. We trace these effects using the history of Air Canada as an exemplar, in the process noting the conceptual and ontological differences between the past and history. Finally, the advantages of a critically historical ANT are discussed as a way to achieve a level of fusion between ANT and feminist thought.

This study demonstrates a practical use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), showing methodological, predictive and unforeseen issues that emerged during the data collection and analysis phases and how they were addressed during the development of this research.

Based on the research of reapplication of a “tecnologia social” (TS) of entrepreneurial education, this article explores the author’s reflections on the adoption of ANT as a theoretical-methodological approach, highlighting the practical implications of a social material theory during fieldwork.

The adoption of ANT places the researcher in front of methodological issues not always foreseen in the research design. Four moments to a practical path through the engagement of ANT agency are highlighted: the network of actors, monitoring of actors, interpretation of data collected and writing results. These moments correspond to methodological issues that the authors faced during the practical journey of the research. At each moment, the challenge aroused is discussed and the methodological choice chosen to address the issue is presented.

The engagement with ANT has enormous potential in the study of management and organizations phenomenon, but its methodological implications in practice are still challenging. The authors seek to share this investigation and engagement in ANT so that other researchers have a reference and a starting point to employ and engage in this theoretical-methodological lens. Thus, it may be possible to anticipate certain difficulties in future research designs and to glimpse at potential developments and paths that the research may lead.

In the English county of Cornwall the annual invading army of tourists which are its biggest source of income are referred to unkindly as ‘emmets’, an ancient word for ‘ants’. Yet the observed behaviour of real life ants suggests that the locals have instinctively hit on a model which has enormous implications for any industry or business trying to understand how its consumer market works.

Medians of a graph have many applications in engineering. Optimal locations for facility centers, distribution of centers and domain decomposition for parallel computation are a few examples of such applications. In this paper, a new ant system (AS) algorithm based on the idea of using two sets of ants, named active and passive ants is proposed for the problem of finding k‐medians of a weighted graph or the facility location problem on a network.

The structure of the algorithm is derived from two known heuristics; namely, rank‐based AS and max‐min ant system with some adjustments in pheromone updating and locating the ants on the graph nodes. The algorithms are designed with and without a local search.

An efficient algorithm for location finding, and the novel application of an ant colony system can be considered as the main contribution of this paper.

Combining two different tools; namely, graph theory and AS algorithm results in an efficient and accurate method for location finding. The results are compared to those of another algorithm based on the theory of graphs.

Attempts to characterise some aspects of the new wave of reaction‐diffusion and ant based computation, and to discuss their place in the class of fully distributed load‐balancing algorithms that solve the dynamic load‐balancing problem of communication networks. The main question of the paper states: what are the advantages of the intellectualisation of the control agents and what are the costs of smartness? We start our investigation with random walk techniques and the electricity paradigm, carry on with the reaction‐diffusion approach, and finish the construction of the computational hierarchy with the ant paradigm and smart agents.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel delay-bounded and power-efficient routing for in-network data aggregation, called DPIDA, which aims to ensure a compromise between the energy consumed during the collection of data sensed by a set of source sensor nodes and their timely delivery to the sink node.

Based on the ant-colony-optimization metaheuristic, the proposal establishes a routing structure that maximizes the number of overlapping routes and minimizes the total transmission power while ensuring delay-bounded paths and a symmetric transmission power assignment to reliably deliver the sensed data.

The proposal was extensively compared to two other known protocols regarding different keys factors. Simulation results, including topology snapshots, show the ability of DPIDA to ensure the energy–latency tradeoff. They also show the superiority of DPIDA compared to the two considered protocols.

This paper presents a novel ant-based protocol that uses in-network data aggregation and transmission power-adjustment techniques to conserve the energy of nodes while ensuring delay-bounded paths and a reliable deliverance of data which is ensured by providing a symmetric transmission power assignment.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and empirically validates a measure of the anticipation of new technologies (ANT) construct, first suggested by Hayes and Wheelwright (1984). ANT allows establishment of a sustained competitive advantage through acquiring new technologies and the capability to use them, in advance of actual need. The theoretical foundation for ANT is developed using the literature on absorptive capacity. Several elements of supply chain management are proposed as antecedents to ANT.

Perceptual survey data from 317 manufacturing plants in ten countries was used to test the hypotheses using structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis.

The key supply chain antecedents of ANT are supply chain planning, internal integration and supplier integration. ANT was related to both operational and cost performance.

Potential limitations include the use of an existing database, the plant as the unit of analysis and the need to include customer integration, as well as supplier integration. The results demonstrate the competitive importance of the ANT construct and the key role that relationships with suppliers play in its development.

This research sheds new light on a construct whose roots are inherently practical. Suppliers and their extended networks are an important source of external knowledge about technology and future customer needs, thus, supply chain relationships are an important contributor to ANT.

Although the role of technology in establishing a competitive advantage has been thoroughly studied, the effectiveness of developing technologies that are expected to be important in the future has not, although this concept was first introduced almost 30 years ago. The authors use absorptive capacity to develop the role of supply chain relationships in building an organization's ANT capability, contributing to the operations strategy literature by grounding a practical construct in the theoretical literature and demonstrating its importance.

Until now, the algorithms used to compute an equilibrate route assignment do not return an integer solution. This disagreement constitutes a non-negligible drawback. In fact, it is shown in the literature that a fractional solution is not a good approximation of the integer one. The purpose of this paper is to find an integer route assignment.

The static route assignment problem is modeled as an asymmetric network congestion game. Then, an algorithm inspired from ant supercolony behavior is constructed, in order to compute an approximation of the Pure Nash Equilibrium (PNE) of the considered game. Several variants of the algorithm, which differ by their initializing steps and/or the kind of the provided algorithm information, are proposed.

An evaluation of these variants over different networks is conduced and the obtained results are encouraging. Indeed, the adaptation of ant supercolony behavior to solve the problem under consideration shows interesting results, since most of the algorithm’s variants returned high-quality approximation of PNE in more than 91 percent of the treated networks.

The asymmetric network congestion game is used to model route assignment problem. An algorithm with several variants inspired from ant supercolony behavior is developed. Unlike the classical ant colony algorithms where there is one nest, herein, several nests are considered. The deposit pheromone of an ant from a given nest is useful for the ants of the other nests.