Autonomous Units for Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem Based on Ant Colony Optimization

Communities of autonomous units are rule-based and graph-transformational systems with a well-defined formal semantics. The autonomous units of a community act and interact in a common environment while striving for their goals. Ant colony systems consist of a set of autonomously behaving ants and are often employed as a metaheuristics for NP-hard logistic problems. In this paper, we demonstrate how communities of autonomous units can be used as a formal graph-transformational framework for modeling ant colony systems. As a first example we model an ant colony system for the Traveling Salesperson Problem as a community of autonomous units