The Optimal Selection of the Parameters for the Ant Colony Algorithm with Small-Perturbation

As a new general-purpose heuristic algorithm, Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm(ACO) has been applied to combinatorial optimization problems. The main characteristics of ACO are positive feedback, distributed computation and the use of constructive greedy heuristic. This paper presents the principle and the hierarchy model of the ACO with small-perturbation. This algorithm is applied to the optimization of power network and the mathematic model is given in this paper. On account of the long search time or local optimization solution of this algorithm, experimental simulation and analyses are carried out on the reasonable selection of the parameters. By timely adjusting the factors, we could control the positive feedback process and enhance the probability of full-scale optimization so as to fix on the appropriate scale of the parameters. The results of this paper are supposed to be propitious to the development of ACO with small-perturbation in power system.