Swarm intelligence is a relatively new approach to problem solving that takes inspiration from the social behaviors of insects and of other animals In particular, ants have inspired a number of methods and techniques among which the most studied and the most successful is the general purpose optimization technique known as ant colony optimization Ant colony optimization (ACO) takes inspiration from the foraging behavior of some ant species These ants deposit pheromone on the ground in order to mark some favorable path that should be followed by other members of the colony Ant colony optimization exploits a similar mechanism for solving optimization problems From the early nineties, when the first ant colony optimization algorithm was proposed, ACO attracted the attention of increasing numbers of researchers and many successful applications are now available Moreover, a substantial corpus of theoretical results is becoming available that provides useful guidelines to researchers and practitioners in further applications of ACO The goal of this article is to introduce ant colony optimization and to survey its most notable applications

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Ant Colony Optimization

A unified view of metaheuristics This book provides a complete background on metaheuristics and shows readers how to design and implement efficient algorithms to solve complex optimization problems across a diverse range of applications, from networking and bioinformatics to engineering design, routing, and scheduling. It presents the main design questions for all families of metaheuristics and clearly illustrates how to implement the algorithms under a software framework to reuse both the design and code. Throughout the book, the key search components of metaheuristics are considered as a toolbox for: Designing efficient metaheuristics (e.g. local search, tabu search, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm optimization, scatter search, ant colonies, bee colonies, artificial immune systems) for optimization problems Designing efficient metaheuristics for multi-objective optimization problems Designing hybrid, parallel, and distributed metaheuristics Implementing metaheuristics on sequential and parallel machines Using many case studies and treating design and implementation independently, this book gives readers the skills necessary to solve large-scale optimization problems quickly and efficiently. It is a valuable reference for practicing engineers and researchers from diverse areas dealing with optimization or machine learning; and graduate students in computer science, operations research, control, engineering, business and management, and applied mathematics.

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Metaheuristics: From Design to Implementation

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a stochastic local search method that has been inspired by the pheromone trail laying and following behavior of some ant species [1]. Artificial ants in ACO essentially are randomized construction procedures that generate solutions based on (artificial) pheromone trails and heuristic information that are associated to solution components. Since the first ACO algorithm has been proposed in 1991, this algorithmic method has attracted a large number of researchers and in the meantime it has reached a significant level of maturity. In fact, ACO is now a well-established search technique for tackling a wide variety of computationally hard problems.

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The introduction of ant colony optimization (ACO) and to survey its most notable applications are discussed. Ant colony optimization takes inspiration from the forging behavior of some ant species. These ants deposit Pheromone on the ground in order to mark some favorable path that should be followed by other members of the colony. The model proposed by Deneubourg and co-workers for explaining the foraging behavior of ants is the main source of inspiration for the development of ant colony optimization. In ACO a number of artificial ants build solutions to an optimization problem and exchange information on their quality through a communication scheme that is reminiscent of the one adopted by real ants. ACO algorithms is introduced and all ACO algorithms share the same idea and the ACO is formalized into a meta-heuristics for combinatorial problems. It is foreseeable that future research on ACO will focus more strongly on rich optimization problems that include stochasticity.

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Ant colony optimization: artificial ants as a computational intelligence technique

https://iridia.ulb.ac.be/IridiaTrSeries/link/IridiaTr2011-004.pdf

The irace package: Iterated racing for automatic algorithm configuration

The MALLBA project tackles the resolution of combinatorial optimization problems using algorithmic skeletons implemented in C++. mallba offers three families of generic resolution methods: exact, heuristic and hybrid. Moreover, for each resolution method, MALLBA provides three different implementations: sequential, parallel for local area networks, and parallel for wide area networks (currently under development). This paper explains the architecture of the MALLBA library, presents some of its skeletons, and offers several computational results to show the viability of the approach.

MALLBA: A Library of Skeletons for Combinatorial Optimisation (Research Note)

The mallba project tackles the resolution of combinatorial optimization problems using algorithmic skeletons implemented in C++. mallba offers three families of generic resolution methods: exact, heuristic and hybrid. Moreover, for each resolution method, mallba provides three different implementations: sequential, parallel for local area networks, and parallel for wide area networks (currently under development). This paper explains the architecture of the mallba library, presents some of its skeletons, and offers several computational results to show the viability of the approach.

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MALLBA: a library of skeletons for combinatorial optimisation

New metaheuristic approaches for the edge-weighted k -cardinality tree problem

The MALLBA project tackles the resolution of combinatorial optimization problems using generic algorithmic skeletons implemented in C++. A skeleton in the MALLBA library implements an optimization method in one of the three families of generic optimization techniques offered: exact, heuristic and hybrid. Moreover, for each of those methods, MALLBA provides three different implementations: sequential, parallel for Local Area Networks, and parallel for Wide Area Networks. This paper introduces the architecture of the MALLBA library, details some of the implemented skeletons, and offers computational results for some classical optimization problems to show the viability of our library. Among other conclusions, we claim that the design used to develop the optimization techniques included in the library is generic and efficient at the same time.

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Maria J. Blesa

Papers

MALLBA: A Library of Skeletons for Combinatorial Optimisation (Research Note)

MALLBA: a library of skeletons for combinatorial optimisation

New metaheuristic approaches for the edge-weighted k -cardinality tree problem

Efficient parallel LAN/WAN algorithms for optimization. The mallba project

An ant colony optimization algorithm for DNA sequencing by hybridization