Scale service with multiple ports and pass these ports to another service

Question

I'm trying to run a system with a controller and multiple workers. While doing a udp-Healthcheck the controller acts as a UDP client and the worker act as a server. The ports where the controller/client should send the udp request to, is passed through args, using Dockers ENTRYPOINT.

The worker also gets his port that he listens to through args, using ENTRYPOINT as well.

I now want to scale the number of workers dynamically using

Docker-compose up --scale worker=[numberOfWorkers]

but I couldn't find anything on how to pass the ports that are now dynamically created from a range of ports. Here is my Docker-compose.yml:

version: '3'

services:
  controller:
    build: controller
    container_name: controller1
    volumes:
      - network-log-volume:/var/controller_logs
    entrypoint: [/controller, worker:80]
  
  worker:
    build: worker 
    ports:
      - "1001-1005:80"
    
    entrypoint: [/worker, "80", ""]
  

The previous "hardcoded" version (which was perfectly working) looked like this:

version: '3'

services:
  controller:
    build: controller
    container_name: controller1
    volumes:
      - network-log-volume:/var/controller_logs
    entrypoint: [/controller, worker1:1231, worker2:1232, worker3:1233, worker4:1234, worker5:1235, worker6:1236]
  
  worker1:
    build: worker 
    container_name: worker1
    expose:
      - "1231"
    ports:
      - "1231:1231"
    
    entrypoint: [/worker, "1231", ""]
  
  worker2:
    build: worker 
    container_name: worker2
    expose:
      - "1232"
    ports:
      - "1232:1232"
    
    entrypoint: [/worker, "1232", ""]
  
  worker3:
    build: worker 
    container_name: worker3
    expose:
      - "1233"
    ports:
      - "1233:1233"
    
    entrypoint: [/worker, "1233", ""]

  worker4:
    build: worker 
    container_name: worker4
    expose:
      - "1234"
    ports:
      - "1234:1234"
    
    entrypoint: [/worker, "1234", ""]

  worker5:
    build: worker 
    container_name: worker5
    expose:
      - "1235"
    ports:
      - "1235:1235"
    
    entrypoint: [/worker, "1235", ""]

So I basically want to make the above Docker-compose.yml be scalable dynamically rather that doing it like that. Thanks!

Edit: Due to the way my lecture is structured I can not change a lot about how the controller and the worker work in general. It is supposed to work with only the docker-compose.yml

I read a bit about using swarms, but I also read that they are deprecated and not to be used anymore.