Letting ants labeling point features [sic.: for 'labeling' read 'label']

Abstract

This paper describes an ant colony system (ACS) for labeling point features. A pre-processing step reduces the search space in a safe way. The ACS applies local improvement and masking, a technique that focuses the optimization on critical regions. Empirical results indicate that the ACS reliably identifies high-quality solutions which are in many cases better than those of a state-of-the-art genetic algorithm for point-feature labeling.