Understanding the Pheromone System Within Ant Colony Optimization

Abstract. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a collection of metaheuristics inspired by foraging in ant colonies, whose aim is to solve combinatorial optimization problems. We identify some principles behind the metaheuristics’ rules; and we show that ensuring their application, as a correction to a published algorithm for the vertex cover problem, leads to a statistically significant improvement in empirical results.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: AUSAI
• Authors: Stephen Gilmour, Mark Dras
• Keywords: Ant Colony Optimization, Artificial Intelligence, AUSAI 2005, Combinatorial Optimization Problems, Vertex Cover Problem