Deformed wing virus is an important contributor to honey bee colony losses. Frequently queen failure is reported as a cause for colony loss. Here we examine whether sexual transmission during multiple matings of queens is a possible way of virus infection in queens. In an environment with high prevalence of deformed wing virus, queens (n = 30) were trapped upon their return from natural mating ...

Two ant algorithms solving a simplified version of a typical university course timetabling problem are presented – Ant Colony System and MAX -MIN Ant System. The algorithms are tested over a set of instances from three classes of the problem. Results are compared with recent results obtained with several metaheuristics using the same local search routine (or neighborhood definition), and a refe...

BACKGROUND: The acute Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection usually ceases before six months, but chronic that lasts for more than months might develop into liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Viral particle load, HBV genotypes association to the x (HBx) gene mutations are probable factors related HCC occurrence. mutation which leads HBx T118N was found as second most common in Indo...

In the last few years a significant number of ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have been proposed for tackling multi-objective optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a software framework that allows to instantiate the most prominent multiobjective ACO (MOACO) algorithms. More importantly, the flexibility of this MOACO framework allows the application of automatic algorithm con...

This paper presents ACO_GLS, a hybrid ant colony optimization approach coupled with a guided local search, applied to a layout problem. ACO_GLS is applied to an industrial case, in a train maintenance facility of the French railway system (SNCF). Results show that an improvement of near 20% is achieved with respect to the actual layout. Since the problem is modeled as a quadratic assignment pro...

This paper gives an algorithm for finding the minimum weight tree having k edges in an edge weighted graph. The algorithm combines a search and optimization technique based on pheromone with a weight based greedy local optimization. Experimental results on a large set of problem instances show that this algorithm matches or surpasses other algorithms including an ant colony optimization algorit...

This paper presents a modification of the ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO) intended to introduce psychology factor of emotion into the algorithm. We define only two emotions ants could have, positive and negative, and correspond to two reaction to perception respectively. For avoiding premature convergence allows Emotional Ant Colony Optimization (EACO) to continue search for better even...