Ant Colony Optimization: An Overview

Abstract

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a class of constructive meta-heuristic algorithms sharing the common approach of constructing a solution on the basis of information provided both by a standard constructive heuristic and by previously constructed solutions. This tutorial is composed of three parts. The first one frames the ACO approach in current trends of research on metaheuristic algorithms for combinatorial optimization; the second outlines current research within the ACO framework, reporting recent results obtained on different problems, while the third part focuses on a particular research line, the ANTS metaheuristic, providing some details on the algorithm and presenting results recently obtained on the quadratic and on the frequency assignment problems.