MAX-MIN Ant System and local search for the traveling salesman problem

Author

Stützle, Thomas ; Hoos, Holger

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Tech. Hochschule Darmstadt, Germany

fYear

1997

fDate

13-16 Apr 1997

Firstpage

309

Lastpage

314

Abstract

Ant System is a general purpose algorithm inspired by the study of the behavior of ant colonies. It is based on a cooperative search paradigm that is applicable to the solution of combinatorial optimization problems. We introduce MAX-MIN Ant System, an improved version of basic Ant System, and report our results for its application to symmetric and asymmetric instances of the well known traveling salesman problem. We show how MAX-MIN Ant System can be significantly improved, extending it with local search heuristics. Our results clearly show that MAX-MIN Ant System has the property of effectively guiding the local search heuristics towards promising regions of the search space by generating good initial tours

Keywords

heuristic programming; minimax techniques; search problems; travelling salesman problems; MAX-MIN Ant System; ant colonies; asymmetric instances; combinatorial optimization problems; cooperative search paradigm; general purpose algorithm; local search heuristics; search space; symmetric instances; traveling salesman problem; Ant colony optimization; Automatic testing; Cities and towns; Computer science; Probability distribution; Shortest path problem; Space exploration; System testing; Traveling salesman problems;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Evolutionary Computation, 1997., IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Indianapolis, IN

Print_ISBN

0-7803-3949-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICEC.1997.592327

Filename

592327