Wisdom of Artificial Crowds—A Metaheuristic Algorithm for Optimization

Abstract

Finding optimal solutions to NP-Hard problems requires exponential time with respect to the size of the problem. Con- sequently, heuristic methods are usually utilized to obtain approximate solutions to problems of such difficulty. In this paper, a novel swarm-based nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm for optimization is proposed. Inspired by human collective intelligence, Wisdom of Artificial Crowds (WoAC) algorithm relies on a group of simulated intelligent agents to arrive at independent solutions aggregated to produce a solution which in many cases is superior to individual solutions of all participating agents. We illustrate superior performance of WoAC by comparing it against another bio-inspired approach, the Genetic Algorithm, on one of the classical NP-Hard problems, the Travelling Salesperson Problem. On average a 3% - 10% improvement in quality of solutions is observed with little computational overhead.