Modified ant system solving tsp problem

Abstract

ACO is applied on various combinatorial optimization problems. One among them is Travelling Salesman Problem. Generally, the fundamental ACO has the disadvantage of the entrapment in the local minimum and stagnation problem. In this paper, we proposed the algorithm named modified ant system (MAS) to resolve the above problems by modifying the pheromone update equation which results in better overall searching ability and also give better optimal solution earlier than AS. The comparison is done between basic ant system and modified ant system on different TSP problem instances. The proposed algorithm illustrates the less cost\length of the tour taken by ants to discover the shortest pathway.