Ant Colony Optimization for optimal control

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has proven to be a very powerful optimization heuristic for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (COPs). It has been demonstrated to work well when applied to various NP-complete problems, such as the traveling salesman problem. In this paper, an ACO approach to optimal control is proposed. This approach requires that a continuous-time, continuous-state model of the system, together with a finite action set, is formulated as a discrete, non-deterministic automaton. The control problem is then translated into a stochastic COP. This method is applied to the time-optimal swing-up and stabilization of a pendulum.