Parallel ACO with a Ring Neighborhood for Dynamic TSP

The current paper introduces a new parallel computing technique based on ant colony optimization for a dynamic routing problem. In the dynamic traveling salesman problem the distances between cities as travel times are no longer fixed. The new technique uses a parallel model for a problem variant that allows a slight movement of nodes within their Neighborhoods. The algorithm is tested with success on several large data sets.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure; accepted J. Information Technology Researc

Applying ACO To Large Scale TSP Instances

Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) is a well known metaheuristic that has proven successful at solving Travelling Salesman Problems (TSP). However, ACO suffers from two issues; the first is that the technique has significant memory requirements for storing pheromone levels on edges between cities and second, the iterative probabilistic nature of choosing which city to visit next at every step is computationally expensive. This restricts ACO from solving larger TSP instances. This paper will present a methodology for deploying ACO on larger TSP instances by removing the high memory requirements, exploiting parallel CPU hardware and introducing a significant efficiency saving measure. The approach results in greater accuracy and speed. This enables the proposed ACO approach to tackle TSP instances of up to 200K cities within reasonable timescales using a single CPU. Speedups of as much as 1200 fold are achieved by the technique

Memory-based immigrants for ant colony optimization in changing environments

Copyright @ 2011 SpringerAnt colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have proved that they can adapt to dynamic optimization problems (DOPs) when they are enhanced to maintain diversity. DOPs are important due to their similarities to many real-world applications. Several approaches have been integrated with ACO to improve their performance in DOPs, where memory-based approaches and immigrants schemes have shown good results on different variations of the dynamic travelling salesman problem (DTSP). In this paper, we consider a novel variation of DTSP where traffic jams occur in a cyclic pattern. This means that old environments will re-appear in the future. A hybrid method that combines memory and immigrants schemes is proposed into ACO to address this kind of DTSPs. The memory-based approach is useful to directly move the population to promising areas in the new environment by using solutions stored in the memory. The immigrants scheme is useful to maintain the diversity within the population. The experimental results based on different test cases of the DTSP show that the memory based immigrants scheme enhances the performance of ACO in cyclic dynamic environments.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of UK under Grant EP/E060722/2

GORTS: genetic algorithm based on one-by-one revision of two sides for dynamic travelling salesman problems

The dynamic travelling salesman problem (DTSP) is a natural extension of the standard travelling salesman problem, and it has attracted significant interest in recent years due to is practical applications. In this article, we propose an efficient solution for DTSP, based on a genetic algorithm (GA), and on the one-by-one revision of two sides (GORTS). More specifically, GORTS combines the global search ability of GA with the fast convergence feature of the method of one-by-one revision of two sides, in order to find the optimal solution in a short time. An experimental platform was designed to evaluate the performance of GORTS with TSPLIB. The experimental results show that the efficiency of GORTS compares favourably against other popular heuristic algorithms for DTSP. In particular, a prototype logistics system based on GORTS for a supermarket with an online map was designed and implemented. It was shown that this can provide optimised goods distribution routes for delivery staff, while considering real-time traffic information.This work was jointly sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61472192 and 91646116, the Scientific and Technological Support Project (Society) of Jiangsu Province under Grant BE2016776, the Talent Project in Six Fields of Jiangsu Province under Grant 2015-JNHB-012, the “333” Scientific Research program of Jiangsu Province under Grant BRA2017228, and the Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Big Data Security and Intelligent Processing at NJUPT

Ant colony optimization with immigrants schemes in dynamic environments

This is the post-print version of this article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2010 Springer-VerlagIn recent years, there has been a growing interest in addressing dynamic optimization problems (DOPs) using evolutionary algorithms (EAs). Several approaches have been developed for EAs to increase the diversity of the population and enhance the performance of the algorithm for DOPs. Among these approaches, immigrants schemes have been found beneficial for EAs for DOPs. In this paper, random, elitismbased, and hybrid immigrants schemes are applied to ant colony optimization (ACO) for the dynamic travelling salesman problem (DTSP). The experimental results show that random immigrants are beneficial for ACO in fast changing environments, whereas elitism-based immigrants are beneficial for ACO in slowly changing environments. The ACO algorithm with hybrid immigrants scheme combines the merits of the random and elitism-based immigrants schemes. Moreover, the results show that the proposed algorithms outperform compared approaches in almost all dynamic test cases and that immigrant schemes efficiently improve the performance of ACO algorithms in DTSP.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of UK under Grant EP/E060722/1

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