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Ireland's rail network struggles with connectivity and efficiency, and is frankly, a pain to use. It does not serve rural areas well, and lines between major cities are unreliable. This project aims to explore the potential of using physarum polycephalum or slime mould, to redesign the network using its natural pathfinding abilities.
My goal was to simulate Ireland's rail network using a virtual simulation inspired by slime mould to propose a more efficient model that balances accessibility, cost and speed. I was inspired by previous similar studies done in places like Tokyo and Canada.
I used C#, a programming language, and Unity, as my development tool. Major cities and towns were represented as nutrients and thousands of individual agents represented the mould cells. The agents' movements were then compared to Ireland's current rail network.
The slime mould grew networks that were like current routes, but different in some areas, particularly around the north of Ireland. The mould also grew new paths to more rural areas, which would improve overall availability.
I used graph theory metrics like efficiency, speed and vulnerability to show that my proposed model is more efficient that the current model.
This project shows that biological systems such as Physarum polycephalum can offer valuable insight into infrastructure design, decisions providing a fresh outlook for optimizing transport networks.
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