AN ENHANCED ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION METAHEURISTIC FOR THE MINIMUM DOMINATING SET PROBLEM

Abstract

This paper proposes an enhanced Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) metaheuristic called ACO-TS to attack the minimum dominating set (MDS) problem. One of the recognized difficulties faced by ACO in its original form is premature convergence, which produces less satisfactory solutions. We propose a way to encourage a higher degree of exploration of the search space by incorporating a technique based on a concept borrowed from genetic algorithms called tournament selection. Instead of always following the standard mechanism for selecting the next solution component, an ant would make its decision based on the outcome of a tournament between randomly selected allowable components. The frequency of the tournament selection is controlled by a probability measure. The use of tournament selection is coupled with an iteration-best pheromone update. To evaluate the enhanced ACO, we consider the MDS problem formulated from ad hoc network clustering. A comparison with its original form shows that the enhanced ACO produces better solutions using fewer number of cycles. We also empirically demonstrate that the proposed ACO produces better solutions than a genetic algorithm. Finally, we argue, based on empirical results, why the tournament selection approach is preferable to a pure random selection method.