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Introduction Social insects, such as ants, termites, bees and wasps exhibit a collective prob lem-solving acue trail-laehavior when foragiaent process results in the selectio n of the shortest path from the nest to a f The fascinating behavior of ants has been inspiring researchers to study swarm a lgorithms or ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms[6] which are computational models currently applied to applications, such as the Traveling Salesman Proble m(TSP)[3,6], graph coloring problem[3], network routing problem[3] and a lot mor e. The emergent behavior or emergent intelligence, which is the consequence of the self-organization[2] and indirect communication between the ants, is also inspir ing from the perspective of computer science, because of the possibility to simu late and potentially exploit this behavior to solve real world applications. Bas ed on the understanding of ant-based algorithms we propose a software framework, which can be employed to imitate the collective behavior of the ants and visual ize the dynamics of a swarm. The framework is implemented in the object-oriented programming language C++, and all the elements of the artificial swarm system a re modeled in C++ classes, which implement the ant algorithm in different levels of abstraction. As the illustration of the software framework we create a softw are swarm for handling the symmetric Traveling Saoperate to oftware, we use a gr aph to hold the traveling data, make (software) ants walk and viseromone on edge s in time. 4