4,465 research outputs found
Convergence results for continuous-time dynamics arising in ant colony optimization
This paper studies the asymptotic behavior of several continuous-time
dynamical systems which are analogs of ant colony optimization algorithms that
solve shortest path problems. Local asymptotic stability of the equilibrium
corresponding to the shortest path is shown under mild assumptions. A complete
study is given for a recently proposed model called EigenAnt: global asymptotic
stability is shown, and the speed of convergence is calculated explicitly and
shown to be proportional to the difference between the reciprocals of the
second shortest and the shortest paths.Comment: A short version of this paper was published in the preprints of the
19th World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control,
Cape Town, South Africa, 24-29 August 201
A Deterministic Model for Analyzing the Dynamics of Ant System Algorithm and Performance Amelioration through a New Pheromone Deposition Approach
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a metaheuristic for solving difficult
discrete optimization problems. This paper presents a deterministic model based
on differential equation to analyze the dynamics of basic Ant System algorithm.
Traditionally, the deposition of pheromone on different parts of the tour of a
particular ant is always kept unvarying. Thus the pheromone concentration
remains uniform throughout the entire path of an ant. This article introduces
an exponentially increasing pheromone deposition approach by artificial ants to
improve the performance of basic Ant System algorithm. The idea here is to
introduce an additional attracting force to guide the ants towards destination
more easily by constructing an artificial potential field identified by
increasing pheromone concentration towards the goal. Apart from carrying out
analysis of Ant System dynamics with both traditional and the newly proposed
deposition rules, the paper presents an exhaustive set of experiments performed
to find out suitable parameter ranges for best performance of Ant System with
the proposed deposition approach. Simulations reveal that the proposed
deposition rule outperforms the traditional one by a large extent both in terms
of solution quality and algorithm convergence. Thus, the contributions of the
article can be presented as follows: i) it introduces differential equation and
explores a novel method of analyzing the dynamics of ant system algorithms, ii)
it initiates an exponentially increasing pheromone deposition approach by
artificial ants to improve the performance of algorithm in terms of solution
quality and convergence time, iii) exhaustive experimentation performed
facilitates the discovery of an algebraic relationship between the parameter
set of the algorithm and feature of the problem environment.Comment: 4th IEEE International Conference on Information and Automation for
Sustainability, 200
An ant colony algorithm for the sequential testing problem under precedence constraints.
We consider the problem of minimum cost sequential
testing of a series (parallel) system under precedence
constraints that can be modeled as a nonlinear integer program.
We develop and implement an ant colony algorithm for the
problem. We demonstrate the performance of this algorithm
for special type of instances for which the optimal solutions
can be found in polynomial time. In addition, we compare the
performance of the algorithm with a special branch and bound
algorithm for general instances. The ant colony algorithm is
shown to be particularly effective for larger instances of the
problem
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