In this paper we present MAX{MIN Ant System (MMAS) that improves on Ant System. MMAS is a general purpose heuristic algorithm based on a cooperative search paradigm that is applicable to the solution of combinatorial optimization problems. In the experiments we apply MMAS to symmetric and asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problems. We describe in detail the improvements on Ant System, discuss the a...

A characteristic feature of Russian post-communist transformation is a high rate of elite continuity that invites an explanation of the demise of the Soviet Union as the result of a rational choice made by its ruling elite. This paper proposes a political-economic model where predatory ruling elite uses costly coercion to raise revenue from the working population, while resistance of the popula...

this study investigates the coordination of production scheduling and maintenance planning in theflow shop scheduling environment. the problem is considered in a bi-objective form, minimizing themakespan as the production scheduling criterion and minimizing the system unavailability as themaintenance planning criterion. the time interval between consecutive maintenance activities as well as the...

using greedy clustering method to solve capacitated location-routing problem with fuzzy demands abstract in this paper, the capacitated location routing problem with fuzzy demands (clrp_fd) is considered. in clrp_fd, facility location problem (flp) and vehicle routing problem (vrp) are observed simultaneously. indeed the vehicles and the depots have a predefined capacity to serve the customerst...

The discourse of participation in and about Brazil has contributed to the wider discourse of the public sphere. As anoccasion to revise the general concept of the public sphere, it carries its own limitations as well. The public sphereis an arena where citizens come together to discuss matters of general interest and through this discussion are thenable to influence the state. The c...

The main purpose of the study was to ascertain the attitude of rural elite farmers towards extension activities performed by Upazilla Agricultural Extension personnel of DAE and to explore the relationship between the selected characteristics of the respondents and their extent of attitude towards those extension activities under reference. The study was conducted in two unions, namely Ratanpur...

The paper presents an exponential pheromone deposition rule to modify the basic ant system algorithm which employs constant deposition rule. A stability analysis using differential equation is carried out to find out the values of parameters that make the ant system dynamics stable for both kinds of deposition rule. A roadmap of connected cities is chosen as the problem environment where the sh...

An Ants System is an artificial system based on the behavior of real ant colonies, which is used to solve combinatorial problems. This is a distributed algorithm composed by a set of cooperating agents called ants which cooperate among them to find good solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. The cooperation follows the behavior of real ants using an indirect form of communication med...

Successful heuristic algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems have mimicked processes observed in nature. Two highly successful families of algorithms that do this are simulated annealing and genetic algorithms. Here, a third family of algorithms, ant colony optimization is explored and implemented in C#. The test bed for evaluating the quality of solutions is based on several...

Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have been applied successfully to combinatorial optimization problems. More recently, Parpinelli et al have applied ACO to data mining classification problems, where they introduced a classification algorithm called Ant Miner. In this paper, we present a system that combines both the proposed Improved Quickreduct algorithm for data preprocessing and ant ...