Solving Dynamic Traveling Salesman Problem with Ant Colony Communities

Abstract

The paper studies Ant Colony Communities (ACC). They are used to solve the Dynamic Travelling Salesman Problem (DTSP). An ACC consists of a server and a number of client ACO colonies. The server coordinates the work of individual clients and sends them cargos with data to process and then receives and integrates partial results. Each client implements the basic version of the ACO algorithm. They communicate via sockets and therefore can run on several separate computers. In the DTSP distances between the nodes change constantly. The process is controlled by a graph generator. In order to study the performance of the ACC, we conducted a substantial number of experiments. Their results indicate that to handle highly dynamic distance matrixes we need a large number of clients.