Free Download | Ant Colony Optimization

This book introduces the rapidly growing field of ant colony optimization. It gives a broad overview of many aspects of ACO, ranging from a detailed description of the ideas underlying ACO, to the definition of how ACO can generally be applied to a wide range of combinatorial optimization problems, and describes many of the available ACO algorithms and their main applications. The book is divided into seven chapters and is organized as follows.  Chapter 1 explains how ants find shortest paths under controlled experimental conditions, and illustrates how the observation of this behavior has been translated into working optimization algorithms. In chapter 2, the ACO metaheuristic is introduced and put into the general context of combinatorial optimization. Basic notions of complexity theory, such as hardness, are given and other major metaheuristics are briefly overviewed. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the in-depth description of all the major ACO algorithms currently available in the literature. This description, which is developed using the traveling salesman problem as a running example, is completed by a guide to implementing the algorithms. A short description of a basic C implementation, as well as pointers to the public software available at www.aco-metaheuristic.org/aco-code/, is given.