The paper attempts to find numerical solutions of Diophantine equations, a challenging problem as there are no general methods to find solutions of such equations. It uses the metaphor of foraging habits of real ants. The ant colony optimization based procedure starts with randomly assigned locations to a fixed number of artificial ants. Depending upon the quality of these positions, ants deposit pheromone at the nodes. A successor node is selected from the topological neighborhood of each of the nodes based on this stochastic pheromone deposit. If an ant bumps into an already encountered node, the pheromone is updated correspondingly. A suitably defined pheromone evaporation strategy guarantees that premature convergence does not take place. The experimental results, which compares with those of other machine intelligence techniques, validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Large-scale problems are nonlinear problems that need metaheuristics, or global optimization algorithms. This paper reviews nature-inspired metaheuristics, then it introduces a framework named Competitive Ant Colony Optimization inspired by the chemical communications among insects. Then a case study is presented to investigate the proposed framework for large-scale global optimization.
This paper research review Ant colony optimization (ACO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA), both are two powerful meta-heuristics. This paper explains some major defects of these two algorithm at first then proposes a new model for ACO in which, artificial ants use a quick genetic operator and accelerate their actions in selecting next state. Experimental results show that proposed hybrid algorithm is effective and its performance including speed and accuracy beats other version.
Université Blaise Pascal（布莱斯·帕斯卡大学）；Université de Technologie de Troyes（特鲁瓦技术大学）
This paper addresses the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP) using an Ant Colony Optimization scheme. Ant Colony schemes can compute solutions for medium scale instances of VRP. The proposed Ant Colony is dedicated to large-scale instances of CARP with more than 140 nodes and 190 arcs to service. The Ant Colony scheme is coupled with a local search procedure and provides high quality solutions. The benchmarks we carried out prove possible to obtain solutions as profitable as CARPET ones can be obtained using such scheme when a sufficient number of iterations is devoted to the ants. It compe…
This Paper will deal with a combination of Ant Colony and Genetic Programming Algorithm to optimize Travelling Salesmen problem (NP-Hard). However, the complexity of the algorithm requires considerable computational time and resources. Parallel implementation can reduce the computational time. In this paper, emphasis in the parallelizing section is given to Multi-core architecture and Multi-Processor Systems which is developed and used almost everywhere today and hence, multi-core parallelization to the combination of algorithm is achieved by OpenMP library by Intel Corporation.
Sichuan Normal University（四川师范大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Chengdu University of Technology（成都理工大学）
To find all extreme points of multimodal functions is called extremum problem, which is a well known difficult issue in optimization fields. Applying ant colony optimization (ACO) to solve this problem is rarely reported. The method of applying ACO to solve extremum problem is explored in this paper. Experiment shows that the solution error of the method presented in this paper is less than 10^-8. keywords: Extremum Problem; Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)
Sichuan Normal University（四川师范大学）；Chengdu University of Technology（成都理工大学）
Ant colony optimization (ACO) has been applied to the field of combinatorial optimization widely. But the study of convergence theory of ACO is rare under general condition. In this paper, the authors try to find the evidence to prove that entropy is related to the convergence of ACO, especially to the estimation of the minimum iteration number of convergence. Entropy is a new view point possibly to studying the ACO convergence under general condition. Key Words: Ant Colony Optimization, Convergence of ACO, Entropy
Interaction between users in online social networks plays a key role in social network analysis. One on important types of social group is full connected relation between some users, which known as clique structure. Therefore finding a maximum clique is essential for some analysis. In this paper, we proposed a new method using ant colony optimization algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm. In the proposed method, in order to attain better results, it is improved process of pheromone update by particle swarm optimization. Simulation results on popular standard social network benchm…
Inferring gene interaction network from gene expression data is an important task in systems biology research. The gene interaction network, especially key interactions, plays an important role in identifying biomarkers for disease that further helps in drug design. Ant colony optimization is an optimization algorithm based on natural evolution and has been used in many optimization problems. In this paper, we applied ant colony optimization algorithm for inferring the key gene interactions from gene expression data. The algorithm has been tested on two different kinds of benchmark datasets an…
Nowadays swarm intelligence-based algorithms are being used widely to optimize the dynamic traveling salesman problem (DTSP). In this paper, we have used mixed method of Ant Colony Optimization (AOC)and gradient descent to optimize DTSP which differs with ACO algorithm in evaporation rate and innovative data. This approach prevents premature convergence and scape from local optimum spots and also makes it possible to find better solutions for algorithm. In this paper, we are going to offer gradient descent and ACO algorithm which in comparison to some former methods it shows that algorithm has…
In this paper Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization (HAntCO) approach in solving Multi--Skill Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (MS--RCPSP) has been presented. We have proposed hybrid approach that links classical heuristic priority rules for project scheduling with Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). Furthermore, a novel approach for updating pheromone value has been proposed, based on both the best and worst solutions stored by ants. The objective of this paper is to research the usability and robustness of ACO and its hybrids with priority rules in solving MS--RCPSP. Experiments have been…
Timetabling is a problem faced in all higher education institutions. The International Timetabling Competition (ITC) has published a dataset that can be used to test the quality of methods used to solve this problem. A number of meta-heuristic approaches have obtained good results when tested on the ITC dataset, however few have used the ant colony optimization technique, particularly on the ITC 2007 curriculum based university course timetabling problem. This study describes an ant system that solves the curriculum based university course timetabling problem and the quality of the algorithm i…
The hydrophobic-polar (HP) model has been widely studied in the field of protein structure prediction (PSP) both for theoretical purposes and as a benchmark for new optimization strategies. In this work we introduce a new heuristics based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) that we called Hybrid Monte Carlo Ant Colony Optimization (HMCACO). We describe this method and compare results obtained on well known HP instances in the 3 dimensional cubic lattice to those obtained with standard ACO and Simulated Annealing (SA). All methods were implemented using an uncon…
In this study, we synthesize a novel dynamical approach for ant colonies enabling them to migrate to new nest sites in a self-organizing fashion. In other words, we realize ant colony migration as a self-organizing phenotype-level collective behavior. For this purpose, we first segment the edges of the graph of ants' pathways. Then, each segment, attributed to its own pheromone profile, may host an ant. So, multiple ants may occupy an edge at the same time. Thanks to this segment-wise edge formulation, ants have more selection options in the course of their pathway determination, thereby incre…
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a very popular metaheuristic for solving computationally hard combinatorial optimization problems. Runtime analysis of ACO with respect to various pseudo-boolean functions and different graph based combinatorial optimization problems has been taken up in recent years. In this paper, we investigate the runtime behavior of an MMAS*(Max-Min Ant System) ACO algorithm on some well known hypergraph covering problems that are NP-Hard. In particular, we have addressed the Minimum Edge Cover problem, the Minimum Vertex Cover problem and the Maximum Weak- Independent Set…
Gradual pattern extraction is a field in (KDD) Knowledge Discovery in Databases that maps correlations between attributes of a data set as gradual dependencies. A gradual dependency may take a form of "the more Attribute K , the less Attribute L". In this paper, we propose an ant colony optimization technique that uses a probabilistic approach to learn and extract frequent gradual patterns. Through computational experiments on real-world data sets, we compared the performance of our ant-based algorithm to an existing gradual item set extraction algorithm and we found out that our algorithm out…
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a metaheuristic proposed by Marco Dorigo in 1991 based on behavior of biological ants. Pheromone laying and selection of shortest route with the help of pheromone inspired development of first ACO algorithm. Since, presentation of first such algorithm, many researchers have worked and published their research in this field. Though initial results were not so promising but recent developments have made this metaheuristic a significant algorithm in Swarm Intelligence. This research presents a brief overview of recent developments carried out in ACO algorithms in …
NeuFACO: Neural Focused Ant Colony Optimization for Traveling Salesman Problem
College of Engineering and Computer Science, VinUniversity（工程与计算机科学学院，Vin大学）；School of Information and Communications Technology, Hanoi University of Science and Technology（信息与通信技术学院，河内科学技术大学）；University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University（工程大学，越南国家大学）
Most transformer failures are attributed to bushings failures. Hence it is necessary to monitor the condition of bushings. In this paper three methods are developed to monitor the condition of oil filled bushing. Multi-layer perceptron (MLP), Radial basis function (RBF) and Rough Set (RS) models are developed and combined through majority voting to form a committee. The MLP performs better that the RBF and the RS is terms of classification accuracy. The RBF is the fasted to train. The committee performs better than the individual models. The diversity of models is measured to evaluate their si…
In this paper fuzzy VRPTW with an uncertain travel time is considered. Credibility theory is used to model the problem and specifies a preference index at which it is desired that the travel times to reach the customers fall into their time windows. We propose the integration of fuzzy and ant colony system based evolutionary algorithm to solve the problem while preserving the constraints. Computational results for certain benchmark problems having short and long time horizons are presented to show the effectiveness of the algorithm. Comparison between different preferences indexes have been ob…
This paper proposes an extension method for Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm called Dynamic Impact. Dynamic Impact is designed to solve challenging optimization problems that has nonlinear relationship between resource consumption and fitness in relation to other part of the optimized solution. This proposed method is tested against complex real-world Microchip Manufacturing Plant Production Floor Optimization (MMPPFO) problem, as well as theoretical benchmark Multi-Dimensional Knapsack problem (MKP). MMPPFO is a non-trivial optimization problem, due the nature of solution fitness value…
The past decade has seen the rapid development of the online newsroom. News published online are the main outlet of news surpassing traditional printed newspapers. This poses challenges to the production and to the consumption of those news. With those many sources of information available it is important to find ways to cluster and organise the documents if one wants to understand this new system. A novel bio inspired approach to the problem of traversing the news is presented. It finds Hamiltonian cycles over documents published by the newspaper The Guardian. A Second Order Swarm Intelligenc…
In this paper, we enriched Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) with interval outranking to develop a novel multiobjective ACO optimizer to approach problems with many objective functions. This proposal is suitable if the preferences of the Decision Maker (DM) can be modeled through outranking relations. The introduced algorithm (named Interval Outranking-based ACO, IO-ACO) is the first ant-colony optimizer that embeds an outranking model to bear vagueness and ill-definition of DM preferences. This capacity is the most differentiating feature of IO-ACO because this issue is highly relevant in practic…
The Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem (MDVRP) is a real-world model of the simplistic Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) that considers how to satisfy multiple customer demands from numerous depots. This paper introduces a hybrid 2-stage approach based on two population-based algorithms - Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) that mimics ant behaviour in nature and the Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) that is based on geopolitical relationships between countries. In the proposed hybrid algorithm, ICA is responsible for customer assignment to the depots while ACO is routing and sequencing the custo…
Ant Colony System (ACS) is a distributed (agent- based) algorithm which has been widely studied on the Symmetric Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). The optimum parameters for this algorithm have to be found by trial and error. We use a Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO) to optimize the ACS parameters working in a designed subset of TSP instances. First goal is to perform the hybrid PSO-ACS algorithm on a single instance to find the optimum parameters and optimum solutions for the instance. Second goal is to analyze those sets of optimum parameters, in relation to instance characterist…
Features selection is an essential step for successful data classification, since it reduces the data dimensionality by removing redundant features. Consequently, that minimizes the classification complexity and time in addition to maximizing its accuracy. In this article, a comparative study considering six features selection heuristics is conducted in order to select the best relevant features subset. The tested features vector consists of fourteen features that are computed for each pixel in the field of view of retinal images in the DRIVE database. The comparison is assessed in terms of se…
The nature has inspired several metaheuristics, outstanding among these is Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), which have proved to be very effective and efficient in problems of high complexity (NP-hard) in combinatorial optimization. This paper describes the implementation of an ACO model algorithm known as Elitist Ant System (EAS), applied to a combinatorial optimization problem called Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP). We propose a method that seeks to reduce delays designating the operation immediately available, but considering the operations that lack little to be available and have a great…
Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science (ICMC), University of São Paulo (USP)（圣保罗大学数学与计算机科学研究所）
Low level classification extracts features from the elements, i.e. physical to use them to train a model for a later classification. High level classification uses high level features, the existent patterns, relationship between the data and combines low and high level features for classification. High Level features can be got from Complex Network created over the data. Local and global features are used to describe the structure of a Complex Network, i.e. Average Neighbor Degree, Average Clustering. The present work proposed a novel feature to describe the architecture of the Network followi…
We explore the relation between memcomputing, namely computing with and in memory, and swarm intelligence algorithms. In particular, we show that one can design memristive networks to solve short-path optimization problems that can also be solved by ant-colony algorithms. By employing appropriate memristive elements one can demonstrate an almost one-to-one correspondence between memcomputing and ant colony optimization approaches. However, the memristive network has the capability of finding the solution in one deterministic step, compared to the stochastic multi-step ant colony optimization. …
University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；Aberystwyth University（阿伯里斯特威斯大学）
Bayesian networks are a useful tool in the representation of uncertain knowledge. This paper proposes a new algorithm called ACO-E, to learn the structure of a Bayesian network. It does this by conducting a search through the space of equivalence classes of Bayesian networks using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). To this end, two novel extensions of traditional ACO techniques are proposed and implemented. Firstly, multiple types of moves are allowed. Secondly, moves can be given in terms of indices that are not based on construction graph nodes. The results of testing show that ACO-E performs be…
This paper discusses the problem of placing weighted items in a circular container in two-dimensional space. This problem is of great practical significance in various mechanical engineering domains, such as the design of communication satellites. Two constructive heuristics are proposed, one for packing circular items and the other for packing rectangular items. These work by first optimizing object placement order, and then optimizing object positioning. Based on these heuristics, an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is described to search first for optimal positioning order, and then …
Ant Colony algorithm has been applied to various optimization problems, however most of the previous work on scaling and parallelism focuses on Travelling Salesman Problems (TSPs). Although, useful for benchmarks and new idea comparison, the algorithmic dynamics does not always transfer to complex real-life problems, where additional meta-data is required during solution construction. This paper looks at real-life outbound supply chain problem using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and its scaling dynamics with two parallel ACO architectures - Independent Ant Colonies (IAC) and Parallel Ants (PA)…
Isomorphic Functionalities between Ant Colony and Ensemble Learning: Part III -- Gradient Descent, Neural Plasticity, and the Emergence of Deep Intelligence
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Rochester Institute of Technology（罗彻斯特理工学院数学与统计学院）；Gosnell School of Life Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology（罗彻斯特理工学院戈斯内尔生命科学学院）；Center for Imaging Science, Rochester Institute of Technology（罗彻斯特理工学院成像科学中心）
The issue of optimizing queries is a cost-sensitive process and with respect to the number of associated tables in a query, its number of permutations grows exponentially. On one hand, in comparison with other operators in relational database, join operator is the most difficult and complicated one in terms of optimization for reducing its runtime. Accordingly, various algorithms have so far been proposed to solve this problem. On the other hand, the success of any database management system (DBMS) means exploiting the query model. In the current paper, the heuristic ant algorithm has been pro…
Stabilizing the complexity of Feedforward Neural Networks (FNNs) for the given approximation task can be managed by defining an appropriate model magnitude which is also greatly correlated with the generalization quality and computational efficiency. However, deciding on the right level of model complexity can be highly challenging in FNN applications. In this paper, a new Model Selection algorithm using Binary Ant Colony Optimization (MS-BACO) is proposed in order to achieve the optimal FNN model in terms of neural complexity and cross-entropy error. MS-BACO is a meta-heuristic algorithm that…
Swarm Intelligence algorithms have gained significant attention in recent years as a means of solving complex and non-deterministic problems. These algorithms are inspired by the collective behavior of natural creatures, and they simulate this behavior to develop intelligent agents for computational tasks. One such algorithm is Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), which is inspired by the foraging behavior of ants and their pheromone laying mechanism. ACO is used for solving difficult problems that are discrete and combinatorial in nature. Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is a fundamental task in natura…
Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto（奥罗普雷托联邦大学）；Universidade Federal de Viçosa（维索萨联邦大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
We tackle the Thief Orienteering Problem (ThOP), an academic multi-component problem that combines two classical combinatorial problems, namely the Knapsack Problem and the Orienteering Problem. In the ThOP, a thief has a time limit to steal items that distributed in a given set of cities. While traveling, the thief collects items by storing them in their knapsack, which in turn reduces the travel speed. The thief has as the objective to maximize the total profit of the stolen items. In this article, we present an approach that combines swarm-intelligence with a randomized packing heuristic. O…
The Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (DVRPTW) is an extension of the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), which takes into account the dynamic nature of the problem. This aspect requires the vehicle routes to be updated in an ongoing manner as new customer requests arrive in the system and must be incorporated into an evolving schedule during the working day. Besides the vehicle capacity constraint involved in the classical VRP, DVRPTW considers in addition time windows, which are able to better capture real-world situations. Despite this, so far, few studies have focused…
Ton Duc Thang University（胡志明市东德大学）；Islamic Azad University（伊斯兰阿扎德大学）；Oxford Brookes University（牛津布鲁克斯大学）；Obuda University（欧布达大学）；Duy Tan University（越南大潭大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
In order to perceive the behavior presented by the multiphase chemical reactors, the ant colony optimization algorithm was combined with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data. This intelligent algorithm creates a probabilistic technique for computing flow and it can predict various levels of three-dimensional bubble column reactor (BCR). This artificial ant algorithm is mimicking real ant behavior. This method can anticipate the flow characteristics in the reactor using almost 30 % of the whole data in the domain. Following discovering the suitable parameters, the method is used for predicti…
The rapid e-commerce growth has made both business community and customers face a new situation. Due to intense competition on one hand and the customer's option to choose from several alternatives business community has realized the necessity of intelligent marketing strategies and relationship management. Web usage mining attempts to discover useful knowledge from the secondary data obtained from the interactions of the users with the Web. Web usage mining has become very critical for effective Web site management, creating adaptive Web sites, business and support services, personalization, …
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a family of nature-inspired metaheuristics often applied to finding approximate solutions to difficult optimization problems. Despite being significantly faster than exact methods, the ACOs can still be prohibitively slow, especially if compared to basic problem-specific heuristics. As recent research has shown, it is possible to significantly improve the performance through algorithm refinements and careful parallel implementation benefiting from multi-core CPUs and dedicated accelerators. In this paper, we present a novel ACO variant, namely the Focused ACO (…
Sichuan Normal University（四川师范大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Chengdu University of Technology（成都理工大学）
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has time complexity O(t*m*N*N), and its typical application is to solve Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), where t, m, and N denotes the iteration number, number of ants, number of cities respectively. Cutting down running time is one of study focuses, and one way is to decrease parameter t and N, especially N. For this focus, the following method is presented in this paper. Firstly, design a novel clustering algorithm named Special Local Clustering algorithm (SLC), then apply it to classify all cities into compact classes, where compact class is the class that all…
Machine Learning-Enhanced Ant Colony Optimization for Column Generation
School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University（RMIT大学计算技术学院）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；La Trobe Business School, La Trobe University（拉筹伯大学拉筹伯商学院）
In this paper, a novel optimal technique for joint angles trajectory tracking control with energy optimization for a biped robot with toe foot is proposed. For the task of climbing stairs by a 9-link biped model, a cycloid trajectory for swing phase is proposed in such a way that the cycloid variables depend on the staircase dimensions. Zero Moment Point(ZMP) criteria is taken for satisfying stability constraint. This paper mainly can be divided into 3 steps: 1) Planning stable cycloid trajectory for initial step and subsequent step for climbing upstairs and Inverse Kinematics using an unsuper…
This article expands on research that has been done to develop a recurrent neural network (RNN) capable of predicting aircraft engine vibrations using long short-term memory (LSTM) neurons. LSTM RNNs can provide a more generalizable and robust method for prediction over analytical calculations of engine vibration, as analytical calculations must be solved iteratively based on specific empirical engine parameters, making this approach ungeneralizable across multiple engines. In initial work, multiple LSTM RNN architectures were proposed, evaluated and compared. This research improves the perfor…
Beyond Static Priors: Dynamic Neural Guidance for Large-Scale Ant Colony Optimization
Center for AI Research（人工智能研究中心）；VinUniversity（文大学）；College of Engineering and Computer Science（工程与计算机科学学院）；Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems（信息与决策系统实验室）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Khulna University of Engineering & Technology（库尔纳工程技术大学）
Solving large traveling salesman problem (TSP) in an efficient way is a challenging area for the researchers of computer science. This paper presents a modified version of the ant colony system (ACS) algorithm called Red-Black Ant Colony System (RB-ACS) for the solutions of TSP which is the most prominent member of the combinatorial optimization problem. RB-ACS uses the concept of ant colony system together with the parallel search of genetic algorithm for obtaining the optimal solutions quickly. In this paper, it is shown that the proposed RB-ACS algorithm yields significantly better performa…
