Some people here works on ant simulation. I like the idea of studying division of labor of cooperating agents/ants.

Perez-Uribe, A., Floreano, D. and Keller, L. (2003) Effects of group composition and level of selection in the evolution of cooperation in artificial ants. In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life ECAL'2003, Springer, LNAI 2801, pp. 128-137. [pdf]

Ants compose about 15% of the animal biomass in most terrestrial environments. Two key features of their enormous success are the ability to cooperate and to perform efficient division of labor. These features, which allow ants to perform complex tasks in a variety of different environments, would be of great benefit for artificial intelligent systems, such as software agents and autonomous robots.

Relatedness is known to have played a major role in favoring the evolution of altruism in social insects, therefore, we would like to determine whether the role of relatedness can be experimentally demonstrated with artificial agents such as robots.

Moreover, this will enable us to infer some guidelines for the design of autonomous agents (robots) capable of cooperation and task self-allocation.