Feed-forward neural networks are commonly used for pattern classification. The classification accuracy of feed-forward neural networks depends on the configuration selected and the training process. Once the architecture of the network is decided, training algorithms, usually gradient descent techniques, are used to determine the connection weights of the feed-forward neural network. However, g...

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms often suffer from criticism for the local optimum and premature convergence. In order to overcome these inherent shortcomings shared by most ACO algorithms, we divide the ordinary ants into two types: the utilizationoriented ants and the exploration-oriented ants. The utilization-oriented ants focus on constructing solutions based on the learned experien...

Quality of Service (QoS) anycast routing problem is a nonlinear combination optimization problem, which is proved to be a NP-complete problem, at present, the problem can be prevailingly solved by heuristic methods. Ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO) is a novel random search algorithm. On the one hand, it does not depend on the specific mathematical description, on the other hand, which ha...

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) [2] is a nondeterministic algorithm framework that mimics the foraging behavior of ants to solve difficult optimization problems. Several researchers have successfully applied ant based algorithm framework in different fields of engineering, but never in VLSI testing. In this paper, we first describe the basics of ACO. We then consider the problem of simultaneously...

Data mining is a process of discovering patterns and relationships in data with the help of various data analysis tools, to make valid predictions. Association rule learning which finds the relationships between the variables. Association rules are important features for image classification, mining and rational selection to obtain accurate classification. In this paper, it is an approach to pr...

Total weighted tardiness is a measure of customer satisfaction. Minimizing it represents satisfying the general requirement of on-time delivery. In this research, we consider an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm to solve the problem of scheduling unrelated parallel machines to minimize total weighted tardiness. The problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. Computational results show that th...

Groundwater long-term monitoring (LTM) is required to assess the performance of groundwater remediation and human being health risk at post-closure sites where groundwater contaminants are still present. The large number of sampling locations, number of constituents to be monitored, and the frequency of the sampling make the LTM costly, especially since LTM may be required over several decades....

Ant colony optimization (ACO) [1–3] is a metaheuristic for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems inspired by the indirect communication of real ants. In ACO algorithms, (artificial) ants construct candidate solutions to the problem being tackled, making decisions that are stochastically biased by numerical information based on (artificial) pheromone trails and available heuristic inf...

Ant colony optimization has been one of the most promising meta-heuristics since its appearance in early 1990s but it is specialized in discrete space optimization problems. To explore the utility of ACO in the filed of continuous problems, this paper proposes an orthogonal search embedded ACO (OSEACO) algorithm. By generating some grids in the search space and embedding an orthogonal search sc...

Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm is a meta-heuristic, multi-agent technique that can be applied for solving difficult NP-Hard Combinatorial Optimization Problems like Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSP), Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and many more. The Positive Feedback Mechanism and Distributed Computing ability makes it very robust in nature. The artificial an...