This paper describes an initiative aimed at adapting swarm intelligence techniques (in particular, Ant Colony Optimization) to an e-learning environment, thanks to the fact that the available online material can be organized in a graph by means of hyperlinks of educational topics. In this case, the agents that move on the graph are students who unconsciously leave pheromones in the environment ...

Article history: Available online 14 May 2014

Ant colony algorithms are a class of metaheuristics which are inspired from the behaviour of real ants. The original idea consisted in simulating the stigmergic communication, therefore these algorithms are considered as a form of adaptive memory programming. A new formalization was proposed for the design of ant colony algorithms, introducing the biological notions of heterarchy and communicat...

This paper presents improved Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms for data mining. The goal of the algorithms is to extract classification rules from data. The traditional Ant Colony Optimization algorithm is enhanced with genetic operators to develop improved ACO algorithms. The genetic operators like crossover, mutation are used to develop Ant Colony Optimization with Crossover (ACOC), AC...

This paper presents a comparative study of Ant Colony and Genetic Algorithms for VLSI circuit bi-partitioning. Ant colony optimization is an optimization method based on behaviour of social insects [27] whereas Genetic algorithm is an evolutionary optimization technique based on Darwinian Theory of natural evolution and its concept of survival of the fittest [19]. Both the methods are stochasti...

In this paper is introduce "flying" ants in Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). In traditional ACO algorithms the ants construct their solution regarding one step forward. In proposed ACO algorithm, the ants make their decision, regarding more than one step forward, but they include only one new element in their solutions.

Many scientific applications running in Cloud Computing system are workflow applications that contains large number of tasks and in which tasks are connected by precedence relations. Efficient scheduling the workflow tasks become a challenging issue in Cloud Computing environments because the scheduling decides performance of the applications. Unfortunately, finding the optimal scheduling is kn...

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the most important combinational optimization problems that have nowadays received much attention because of its practical applications in industrial and service problems. In this paper, a hybrid two-phase meta-heuristic algorithm called MACSGA used for solving the TSP is presented. At the first stage, the TSP is solved by the modified ant colony s...

water conveyance systems (wcss) are costly infrastructures in terms of materials, construction, maintenance and energy requirements. much attention has been given to the application of optimization methods to minimize the costs associated with such infrastructures. historically, traditional optimization techniques have been used, such as linear and non-linear programming. in this paper, applica...