Beam-ACO for the longest common subsequence problem

The longest common subsequence problem is classical string problem. It has applications, for example, in pattern recognition and bioinformatics. In this work we present a so-called Beam-ACO approach for solving this problem. Beam-ACO algorithms are hybrid techniques that results from a combination of ant colony optimization and beam search, which is an incomplete branch and bound derivative. Our results show that Beam-ACO is able to find new best solutions for 31 out of 60 benchmark instances that we chose for the experimental evaluation of the algorithm.