An Improved Ant Colony Algorithm Applied in the TSP Problem

Abstract

Ant colony algorithm is a kind of intelligent algorithm imitating the group behavior of ants. The positive feedback mechanism is not only its advantage which makes the ant colony algorithm quickly converge to optimal solutions of a problem, but also its defect which makes it easy to fall into the local optimal solutions. ACS and MMAS are the two typically improved ant algorithms by introducing the pseudo random probability selection rule and maximum-minimum pheromone restriction rule to accelerate the converging speed of this algorithm and avoid falling into local optimal solutions. At present, there is no algorithm put forward to improve the algorithm using the effect of the heuristic information. This paper presents an improved ant colony algorithm based on the heuristic information of direction, and provides a new idea for the study on the improved ant colony algorithm.