A Novel Firefly Algorithm Based Ant Colony Optimization for Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems

Inspired by ant colony optimization algorithm, a new firefly optimization algorithm is presented which we call firefly colony optimization algorithm (FCO). Unlike the standard firefly algorithm, the proposed approach is a distributed, and constructive greedy metaheuristic which uses the positive feedback to construct greedily good solutions, and to avoid a premature convergence to low quality solutions. We have assessed the performance of the proposed methodology on the bin packing problem (BPP). The results found show clearly the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.