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Ryan Ward. Ant Colony Optimization. Overview. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) uses ants finding food as inspiration for algorithms to find near optimal solutions to computationally intensive problems
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Ryan Ward Ant Colony Optimization
Overview • Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) uses ants finding food as inspiration for algorithms to find near optimal solutions to computationally intensive problems • Has been applied to multiple NP-hard problems such as the Traveling Salesman Problem, Job-Shop Scheduling Problem, and the Quadratic Assignment Problem
Traveling Salesman Problem • Given n nodes on a graph, find the circuit that visits all the nodes with the lowest cost • 2D Euclidean Symmetric
Natural Ant System • Initially, ants explore randomly • Leave behind pheromone when they travel back to colony from food • Pheromone evaporates over time • Ants follow strong pheromone left behind by other ants • Short routes to food have more pheromone (less distance = less evaporation)
Consequences of Natural System • Independent agents communicating to each other by effecting the environment • Agents act independently by exploring solution space early, then together by converging on good solutions • Continuously updating and changing solution (partial on-line algorithm)
Create n agents, initialize cost and pheromone matrices • While end conditions are not met • agents create circuits, deciding where to go at each step depending on cost and pheromone • update pheromone • Pheromone updating can be done in multiple ways: • All ants add pheromone to their best route • The ant(s) with the best route adds pheromone
Exploration vs. Exploitation • Pheromone vs. known cost • Evaporation • Pheromone added by ants is a function of distance • Pheromone subtracted after move • How ants add pheromone