The Ant Heuristic “Reloaded”

The Ant Colony Optimization Meta-Heuristic

Ant Colony Optimization: A New Meta-Heuristic

Recently, a number of algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of ant colonies have been applied to the solution of difficult discrete optimization problems. In this paper we put these algorithms in a common framework by defining the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic. A couple of paradigmatic examples of applications of these novel meta-heuristic are given, as well as a brief ove...

An ANT Heuristic for the Frequency Assignment Problem

The problem considered in this paper consists in defining an assignment of frequencies to radio links, to be established between base stations and mobile transmitters, which minimizes the global interference over a given region. This problem is NP-hard and few results have been reported on techniques for solving it to optimality. We applied to this version of the frequency assignment problem an...

Optimization of Large Transport Networks Using the Ant Colony Heuristic

Long-term transportation planning in larger regions encompasses more than the evaluation of individual infrastructure projects; it must also assess synergies and interference among sets of projects. The objective is the maximizing of the overall benefit within specific budget restrictions by finding the most favourable bundle of projects, i.e. solving the network design problem. For large numbe...

Ant-Q Hyper Heuristic Approach applied to the Cross- domain Heuristic Search Challenge problems

The first Cross-domain Heuristic Search Challenge (CHeSC 2011) is an international research competition aimed at measuring hyperheuristics performance over several problem domains. Hyper-heuristics are new approaches which aim at raising the level of abstraction when solving combinatorial optimisation problems. During this competition, we have applied the Ant-Q hyper-heuristic approach, propose...