A new solution algorithm for improving performance of ant colony optimization

This study proposes an improved solution algorithm using ant colony optimization (ACO) for finding global optimum for any given test functions. The procedure of the ACO algorithms simulates the decision-making processes of ant colonies as they forage for food and is similar to other artificial intelligent techniques such as Tabu search, Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms. ACO algorithms can be used as a tool for optimizing continuous and discrete mathematical functions. The proposed algorithm is based on each ant searches only around the best solution of the previous iteration with beta. The proposed algorithm is called as ACORSES, an abbreviation of ACO Reduced SEarch Space. beta is proposed for improving ACO's solution performance to reach global optimum fairly quickly. The ACORSES is tested on fourteen mathematical test functions taken from literature and encouraging results were obtained. The performance of ACORSES is compared with other optimization methods. The results showed that the ACORSES performs better than other optimization algorithms, available in literature in terms of minimum values of objective functions and number of iterations. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.