Evolving strategies for updating pheromone trails: A case study with the TSP

Abstract

Ant Colony Optimization is a bio-inspired technique that can be applied to solve hard optimization problems. A key issue is how to design the communication mechanism between ants that allows them to effectively solve a problem. We propose a novel approach to this issue by evolving the current pheromone trail update methods. Results obtained with the TSP show that the evolved strategies perform well and exhibit a good generalization capability when applied to larger instances. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.