ANT COLONY

OPTIMIZATION

By - Aman Kr. Singh

SOME FACTS ABOUT ANT
 INTRODUCTION
• It is a way to solve optimisation problems based
on the way that ants indirectly communicate
directions to each other.
• ACO is developed by Marco Dorigo in 1992.
• Probabilistic technique.
• Searching for optimal path in the graph based
on behaviour of ants seeking a path between
their colony and source of food.
• Meta-heuristic optimization(advanced technique
for finding solution to complex problems).
 OVERVIEW OF CONCEPTS
• Ants navigate from nest to food source. Ants are blind.
• Shortest path is discovered via pheromone trails.
• Each ant move at random.
• Pheromone is deposited on path.
• More pheromone on path increases probability of path being
followed.
OVERVIEW OF CONCEPTS
 OVERVIEW OF SYSTEM
• The ants walk to and far away from the nest to get the food, while moving they depositing a substance
called —pheromone on their path.
• So that next ant that follow the first one is able to smell the pheromone and it influences the choice of their
paths as the ants are able to follow stronger pheromone
concentrations.
• The pheromones that are deposited on the ground forms the pheromone trail. This allows all ants to find
the sources of food that have previously been identified by their
colony ants.
 OVERVIEW OF SYSTEM
• The pheromone keeps on evaporating it stays only for a short timeperiod.
• So that the ant can able to select the shorter path and it would also be the first one to return to the nest. This
function is due to a very high probability of the ant choosing the same shorter path on its return.
• Therefore, finally after some time, all the colony ants converge to follow the shortest path that has been chose.
 META-HEURISTIC
• Heuristic method for solving a very general class of
computational problems by combining user-given
heuristics in the hope of obtaining a more efficient
procedure.
• ACO is meta-heuristic.
• Soft computing technique for solving hard discrete
optimization problems USES STIGMERGY AND
SWARM INTELIGENCE TO FIND THE DATA
 STIGMERG
Y
Self-organization in social insects often requires interactions among
insects: such interactions can be direct or indirect. Direct interactions
consist obviously and mainly of visual or chemical contacts,
trophallaxis, antennation between individuals. In the second possibility,
we speak about indirect inter- action between two individuals when
one of them modifies the environment and the other responds to the
new environment at a later time. Such an interaction is an example of
stigmergy.
 SWARM INTELIGENCE
Swarm intelligence offers an alternative way of designing
intelligent systems, in which autonomy, emergence and
distributed functioning, replace control, preprogramming, and
centralization. It includes Social insect’s cooperation & Self-
organization in social insects
 PROCEDURE
• Set Parameters, Initialize pheromone trails
• SCHEDULE ACTIVITIES
1. Construct Ant Solutions
2. Daemon Actions (optional)
3. Update Pheromones
ACO - CONSTRUCT ANT SOLUTIONS
An ant will move from node i to node j with
probability
ACO - PHEROMONE UPDATE
 APPLICATIONS OF ACO
• Routing in telecommunication networks
• Routing and Load-Balancing Problems
Ex - Travelling Salesman Problem
• Graph Coloring
• Continuous Optimization Problems
• Constraint Satisfaction
 ADVANTAGES OF ACO
• Inherent parallelism
• Positive Feedback accounts for rapid discovery of good solutions
• Efficient for Traveling Salesman Problem and
similar problems
• Can be used in dynamic applications (adapts to
changes such as new distances, etc.)
 DISADVANTAGES OF ACO
• Theoretical analysis is difficult
• Sequences of random decisions (not independent)
• Probability distribution changes by iteration
• Research is experimental rather than theoretical
• Time to convergence is uncertain (but convergence is
guaranteed! )
 CONCLUSION
• Artificial Intelligence technique used to develop a new
method to solve problems unsolvable since last many years.
• ACO is a recently proposed metaheuristic approach for
solving hard combinatorial optimization problems.
• Artificial ants implement a randomized construction heuristic
which makes probabilistic decisions.
• ACO shows great performance with the “ill-structured”
problems like network routing.
THANK
YOU