Measuring efficiency of ant colony communities

Abstract

The paper presents a study on the efficiency measures of the Ant Colony Communities (ACC). The ACC is an approach to parallelize the Ant Colony Optimization algorithm (ACO). An ACC is made up of a Community Server that coordinates the work of a set Ant Colony clients. Each client implements a classical ACO algorithm. The individual colonies work in an asynchronous manner processing data sent by server and sending back the obtained results. There are many possible locations for the clients: the same computer as the server, computers of a local or wide area network. The paper presents a detailed description of concept the ACC and reports the study of the efficiency of the such Communities. The efficiency is measured by their power (the amount of data processed in a given period of time) and scalability—the efficiency of adding colony clients on the Community. The paper contains also the taxonomy of parallel implementations of the Ant Colony.