A common interval guided ACO algorithm for permutation problems

Abstract

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has been successfully applied to many combinatorial optimization problems. In this work we propose a new solution construction scheme for ACO. This scheme uses the common intervals of the current iteration's best solutions to guide the ants during solution construction. Firstly, we compared the performance of ACO and the proposed algorithm Common Interval ACO (CIACO). Secondly, we conducted an in-depth study for the CIACO algorithm to investigate the influence of the common interval guidance. For both experiments a large parameter space was used. The results show, that common intervals can be used to improve the solution quality in comparison to the standard ACO algorithm.