Allocating Students to Industry Placements Using Integer Programming and Ant Colony Optimisation

Niching for Ant Colony Optimisation

Evolutionary Computation niching methods, such as Fitness Sharing and Crowding, are aimed at simultaneously locating and maintaining multiple optima to increase search robustness, typically in multi-modal function optimization. Such methods have been shown to be useful for both single and multiple objective optimisation problems. Niching methods have been adapted in recent years for other optim...

Ant Colony Optimisation: Algorithms and Applications

RNA Secondary Structure Prediction using Ant Colony Optimisation

It is important to know the secondary structure of RNA for applications such as drug development and modelling single stranded viruses. Predictive methods have various degrees of accuracy but are significantly faster and cheaper than empirical methods such as X-ray crystallography. This project explores how Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) performs on the task of RNA secondary structure prediction...

Solving a unique Shortest Path problem using Ant Colony Optimisation

Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) has in the past proved suitable to solve many optimisation problems. This research explores the ability of the ACO algorithm to balance two quality metrics (length and cost) in its decision making process. Results are given for a preliminary investigation based on a series of shortest path problems. It is concluded that, for these problems at least, the solution qu...

Model Checking the Ant Colony Optimisation

We present a model for the travelling salesman problem (TSP) solved using the ant colony optimisation (ACO), a bio-inspired mechanism that helps speed up the search for a solution and that can be applied to many other problems. The natural complexity of the TSP combined with the selforganisation and emergent behaviours that result from the application of the ACO make model-checking this system ...