Ant

Colony
Optimization.

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Background.
 Proposed by Marco Dorigo et al. in 1990s

 Inspired by the social behaviours of ant

colonies

 Main application: Network Optimisation

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The Ants.
 Can explore vast areas without global view of
the ground.

 Can find the food and bring it back to the

nest.

 Will converge to the shortest path.

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How can they manage such
great tasks ?
 By leaving pheromones behind them.

 Wherever they go, they let pheromones behind

here, marking the area as explored and
communicating to the other ants that the way is
known.

 Double Bridge experiment

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Double Bridge Experiment
The more ants follow a trail, the more attractive that trail becomes for being followed.

NEST FOOD

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Route Selection.
 Ants are forced to decide whether they should go left or
right, and the choice that is made is a random decision.

 Pheromone accumulation is faster on the shorter path.

 The difference in pheromone content between the two

paths over time makes the ants choose the shorter
path.

 Different optimization problems have been explored

using a simulation of this real ant behavior.

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Traveling Salesman
Problem.
◦ A salesman has to visit ‘n’
towns cyclically.
◦ In one tour he visits each
towns just once and finishes
up where he started.
In what order should he
visit them to minimise the
distance travelled?
◦ How many orderings? ( n=21)
20!= 20x19x18x17……3x2x1

=2,432,902,008,176,640,000

This number is so big that if the computer could

check 1 billion orderings every second it would still
take 77 years to check them all!
So, we need clever algorithms to solve it.

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Problem Definition.
OBJECTIVE:
Given a set of ‘n’ cities, the
Traveling
Salesman Problem requires a
salesman to find the shortest route
between the given cities and return
to the starting city, while keeping in
mind that each city can be visited
only once.

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Flowchart of ACO
START ACO

Locate ants randomly Have the

in cities across the NO maximum YES
grid and store the Iterations been
current city performed
in a tabu list

NO Determine the shortest

Determine probabilistically tour till now and STOP
as to which city to visit next update pheromone ACO

Move to next city and Have all YES

Record the length of
place this city in the cities been
tour and clear tabu list
tabu list visited

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TSP Applications.
 Lots of practical applications

 Routing such as in trucking, delivery, UAVs

 Manufacturing routing such as movement of parts

along manufacturing floor or the amount of solder
on circuit board

 Network design such as determining the amount of

cabling required

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Questions

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