879 research outputs found
SamACO: variable sampling ant colony optimization algorithm for continuous optimization
An ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm offers
algorithmic techniques for optimization by simulating the foraging behavior of a group of ants to perform incremental solution
constructions and to realize a pheromone laying-and-following
mechanism. Although ACO is first designed for solving discrete
(combinatorial) optimization problems, the ACO procedure is
also applicable to continuous optimization. This paper presents
a new way of extending ACO to solving continuous optimization
problems by focusing on continuous variable sampling as a key
to transforming ACO from discrete optimization to continuous
optimization. The proposed SamACO algorithm consists of three
major steps, i.e., the generation of candidate variable values for
selection, the ants’ solution construction, and the pheromone
update process. The distinct characteristics of SamACO are the
cooperation of a novel sampling method for discretizing the
continuous search space and an efficient incremental solution
construction method based on the sampled values. The performance
of SamACO is tested using continuous numerical functions
with unimodal and multimodal features. Compared with some
state-of-the-art algorithms, including traditional ant-based algorithms
and representative computational intelligence algorithms
for continuous optimization, the performance of SamACO is seen
competitive and promising
A memetic ant colony optimization algorithm for the dynamic travelling salesman problem
Copyright @ Springer-Verlag 2010.Ant colony optimization (ACO) has been successfully applied for combinatorial optimization problems, e.g., the travelling salesman problem (TSP), under stationary environments. In this paper, we consider the dynamic TSP (DTSP), where cities are replaced by new ones during the execution of the algorithm. Under such environments, traditional ACO algorithms face a serious challenge: once they converge, they cannot adapt efficiently to environmental changes. To improve the performance of ACO on the DTSP, we investigate a hybridized ACO with local search (LS), called Memetic ACO (M-ACO) algorithm, which is based on the population-based ACO (P-ACO) framework and an adaptive inver-over operator, to solve the DTSP. Moreover, to address premature convergence, we introduce random immigrants to the population of M-ACO when identical ants are stored. The simulation experiments on a series of dynamic environments generated from a set of benchmark TSP instances show that LS is beneficial for ACO algorithms when applied on the DTSP, since it achieves better performance than other traditional ACO and P-ACO algorithms.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of UK under Grant EP/E060722/01 and Grant EP/E060722/02
An Improved Excitation Matching Method based on an Ant Colony Optimization for Suboptimal-Free Clustering in Sum-Difference Compromise Synthesis
Dealing with an excitation matching method, this paper presents a global optimization strategy for the optimal clustering in sum-difference compromise linear arrays. Starting from a combinatorial formulation of the problem at hand, the proposed technique is aimed at determining the sub-array configuration expressed as the optimal path inside a directed acyclic graph structure modelling the solution space. Towards this end, an ant colony metaheuristic is used to benefit of its hill-climbing properties in dealing with the non-convexity of the sub-arraying as well as in managing graph searches. A selected set of numerical experiments are reported to assess the efficiency and current limitations of the ant-based strategy also in comparison with previous local combinatorial search methods. (c) 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works
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