A multiple ant colony optimization approach for load-balancing.

Sun Weng Hong.Thesis submitted in: October 2002.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 116-121).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.7Chapter 2. --- Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) --- p.9Chapter 2.1 --- ACO vs. Traditional Routing --- p.10Chapter 2.1.1 --- Routing information --- p.10Chapter 2.1.2 --- Routing overhead --- p.12Chapter 2.1.3 --- Adaptivity and Stagnation --- p.14Chapter 2.2 --- Approaches to Mitigate Stagnation --- p.15Chapter 2.2.1 --- Pheromone control --- p.15Chapter 2.2.1.1 --- Evaporation: --- p.15Chapter 2.2.1.2 --- Aging: --- p.16Chapter 2.2.1.3 --- Limiting and smoothing pheromone: --- p.17Chapter 2.2.2 --- Pheromone-Heuristic Control --- p.18Chapter 2.2.3 --- Privileged Pheromone Laying --- p.19Chapter 2.2.4 --- Critique and Comparison --- p.21Chapter 2.2.4.1 --- Aging --- p.22Chapter 2.2.4.2 --- Limiting pheromone --- p.22Chapter 2.2.4.3 --- Pheromone smoothing --- p.23Chapter 2.2.4.4 --- Evaporation --- p.25Chapter 2.2.4.5 --- Privileged Pheromone Laying --- p.25Chapter 2.2.4.6 --- Pheromone-heuristic control --- p.26Chapter 2.3 --- ACO in Routing and Load Balancing --- p.27Chapter 2.3.1 --- Ant-based Control and Its Ramifications --- p.27Chapter 2.3.2 --- AntNet and Its Extensions --- p.35Chapter 2.3.3 --- ASGA and SynthECA --- p.40Chapter 3. --- Multiple Ant Colony Optimization (MACO) --- p.45Chapter 4. --- MACO vs. ACO --- p.51Chapter 4.1 --- Analysis of MACO vs. ACO --- p.53Chapter 5. --- Applying MACO in Load Balancing --- p.89Chapter 5.1 --- Applying MACO in Load-balancing --- p.89Chapter 5.2 --- Problem Formulation --- p.91Chapter 5.3 --- Types of ant in MACO --- p.93Chapter 5.3.1 --- Allocator. --- p.94Chapter 5.3.2 --- Destagnator. --- p.95Chapter 5.3.3 --- Deallocator. --- p.100Chapter 5.4 --- Global Algorithm --- p.100Chapter 5.5 --- Discussion of the number of ant colonies --- p.103Chapter 6. --- Experimental Results --- p.105Chapter 7. --- Conclusion --- p.114Chapter 8. --- References --- p.116Appendix A. Ants in MACO --- p.122Appendix B. Ants in SACO. --- p.12