MDACS is a multithreading and distributed simulator of ant colonies.

The goal of this program is to simulate transporting and clustering objects by an ant colony. It consists of representing an ant colony dropping and picking different types of objects on heaps depending on their density. Ants will move and explore an area represented as a 2D grid.

• initialization of objects, ants and grid is done randomly by the server
• both server and clients are multithreading
• number of threads and ants per client is randomly decided by server
• server synchronizes clients
• clients send their ants positions to server. Server can accept or not
• client(s) handle(s) transporting and clustering of ants given by the server
• three different configurations are provided: easy, hard, and extreme

• chance to execute the program on a single computer or on multiple computers connected to a network
• clients can be on the same server's computer or on multiple computers

• Linux distribution
• GLUT is required for the GUI

A very basic GUI is used for showing colony's progress. Thanks to Guillaume Perez for his GLUT based library.

Clone the repository on all computers you want to use:

$ git clone --recursive [email protected]:lukesmolo/MDACS.git

Go to src and choose which configuration to use by copying and renaming the Config file you want to use in Config.h.

For example:

$ cd src
$ cp Config.h.hard Config.h

Compile the program:

$ make

Open a terminal for each client and run the server and clients in different terminals.
For example, on terminal 1:

$ ./main

On terminal 2 and 3:

$ ./client

If you use rxvt-unicode, you can just use:

$ make run

On each client modify the DEFAULT_SERVER_ADDRESS macro in Config.h, inserting the server IP address.
For example:

#define DEFAULT_SERVER_ADDRESS "192.168.1.18"

Compile the program on each computer involved:

$ make

Run server on the server computer:

$ ./main

Run client on each client computer:

$ ./client

Of course, you can have more clients on the same computer. Just use more terminals.
If you modify Config.h file, please clean all and compile again:

$ make clean
$ make

Sometimes the server or a client seems not working. This is actually caused by the random distribution function that spreads in a very bad way threads/ants. Please, just restart the program and hopefully this time everything will be ok.

libEngine.a, the GLUT based library used in this project for GUI, was written by Guillaume Perez.
Here his project.

MDACS is released under the GPLv2 license.

• improve client's ant algorithm for deciding how to move ants