Parameter Self-Adaptation in an Ant Colony Algorithm for Continuous Optimization

Abstract

ACO $_{\mathbb {R}}$ is a well-established ant colony optimization algorithm for continuous-domain optimization. We present an approach for the dynamic adaptation of the ACO $_{\mathbb {R}}$ algorithm’s controlling parameters, focusing on the search width parameter, based on using several pre-specified parameter configurations, which we call personalities. Before an ant starts to generate a candidate solution, it stochastically adopts a personality based on the relative past success of different personalities. The success of a personality is measured, in turn, by the survival rate of the previous solutions generated by the ants adopting that personality. The premise of our approach is that some personalities will be more appropriate than others for different phases of the search. In addition, our adaptive approach can accommodate solution recombination, the use of which within ACO $_{\mathbb {R}}$ was recently explored in the previous work. It allows the frequency of applying recombination and the type of recombination operator to be dynamically adapted, by having one or more recombination personalities among the competing personalities. We evaluate these proposals experimentally on two applications: 1) training feedforward neural networks for classification using 65 benchmark datasets from the University of California Irvine repository and 2) optimizing several popular synthetic benchmark continuous-domain functions. Our experimental results indicate that our proposals perform better than the standard ACO $_{\mathbb {R}}$ on both applications, to a statistically significant extent.