Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization for intensification and diversification

The study of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has become an active research field in recent years. ACO which is based on feeding behavior of ants utilizes pheromone information to optimize. In optimization process of ACO, a balance between the intensification and diversification of a search is important. This paper discusses a new pheromone update rule which enables to control the balance. In the proposed technique, the intensification and diversification are periodically changed, which allows performance of both a global and a local search. In addition, a hybrid technique is introduced to improve searching performance. The validity of the proposed technique is verified by comparative experiments using benchmark data.