Looking to biology for transport network design

The latest issue of Science includes a report of fascinating new experimental work using slime mould that suggests that we should take a lead from biology when thinking about how to design scalable and robust transport networks.  CABDyN Scientific Management Board member Mark Fricker and CABDyN member Dan Bebber, in collaboration with colleagues in Japan led by Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University, show that an appropriate distribution of food sources allows slime mould to grow a network that replicates the topology of the actual railway network in Japan.  Hence, the necessary trade-offs between efficiency, cost and robustness that would underlie human decisions in designing an infrastructure network appear to have been encoded into a fairly primitive organism through the process of biological evolution.  The team complements these experimental findings by developing a mathematical model to capture the observed dynamics of network adaptability.  Potentially this could inform new more adaptive and decentralised approaches to network design that may find application in a number of settings, such as mobile ad hoc networks.  For the article in Science see here.  For a discussion of the work in the same issue of Science see here.  For coverage of the story by the Oxford University Press Office see here.
22 January 2010