A novel heuristic filter based on ant colony optimization for non-linear systems state estimation

Abstract

A new heuristic filter, called Continuous Ant Colony Filter, is proposed for non-linear systems state estimation. The new filter formulates the states estimation problem as a stochastic dynamic optimization problem and utilizes a colony of ants to find and track the best estimation. The ants search the state space dynamically in a similar scheme to the optimization algorithm, known as Continuous Ant Colony System. The performance of the new filter is evaluated for a nonlinear benchmark and the results are compared with those of Extended Kalman Filter and Particle Filter, showing improvements in terms of estimation accuracy. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.