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Faizan Hyder 08040619-098

Swarm Intelligence
What is Swarm? A large or dense group of insects.

Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial.

Characteristics of Swarms
Composed of many individuals Individuals are Of the same kind Local interaction based on simple rules Self-organization

Two principles of Swarm Intelligence

Self-organization is based on:
activity amplification by positive feedback activity balancing by negative feedback multiple interactions

Stigmergy - stimulation by work - is based on:

Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination between agents or actions Work as behavioural response to the environmental state work that does not depend on specific agents

Ant Colony Optimization:

A heuristic optimization method for shortest path and other optimization problems which borrows ideas from biological ants.
ACO is implemented as a team of intelligent agents which simulate the ants behavior, walking around the graph representing the problem to solve using mechanisms of cooperation and adaptation.

Ant Colony Optimization - Biological Inspiration

Inspired by foraging behavior of ants. Ants find shortest path to food source from nest. Ants deposit pheromone along traveled path which is used by other ants to follow the trail. This kind of indirect communication via the local environment is called stigmergy.

Pheromone
Substances secreted by an animal to influence the behavior of other animals of the same species. Two minutes after a ant has marked a trail, the pheromone has evaporated to a point that is below detection level. Only if food is found does the worker emit a pheromone trail and only on the way back to the nest.

Pheromone(Cont..)
If a worker loses the trail, it travels in small circles until the trail is either found, or another worker intercepts the lost ant by antennae touching and guides it back to the trail

Foraging behavior of Ants

2 ants start with equal probability of going on either path.

Foraging behavior of Ants

The ant on shorter path has a shorter to-and-fro time from its nest to the food.

Foraging behavior of Ants

The density of pheromone on the shorter path is higher because of 2 passes by the ant (as compared to 1 by the other).

Foraging behavior of Ants

The next ant takes the shorter route.

Foraging behavior of Ants

Over many iterations, more ants begin using the path with higher pheromone, thereby further reinforcing it.

Foraging behavior of Ants

After some time, the shorter path is almost exclusively used.

ACO algorithm
Main steps of the ACO algorithm are given below: Pheromone trail initialization Solution construction using pheromone trail Each ant constructs a complete solution to the problem according to a probabilistic State transition rule. The state transition rule depends mainly on the state of the pheromone . Pheromone trail update.

Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Choosing Next Node

When being at a node, an ant chooses to go to a unvisited node at time t with a probability given by

where jki is, the set of cities which antk has not yet visited; i,j (t) is the pheromone value on the edge(i, j) at the time t, is the weight of pheromone; i,j (t) is a priori available heuristic information on the edge (i, j) at the time t, is the weight of heuristic information. Two parameters and determine the relative inuence of pheromone trail and heuristic information.

Pheromone Update
When all the ants have completed a solution, the trails are updated by

where is the pheromone trail evaporation rate (0 << 1), Q is a constant for pheromone updating.

Advantages
For TSPs (Traveling Salesman Problem), relatively efficient Performs better against other global optimization techniques for TSP (neural net, genetic algorithms)

Compared to GAs (Genetic Algorithms):less affected by poor initial solutions (due to combination of random path selection and colony memory)
Can be used in dynamic applications (adapts to changes such as new distances, etc.)