Conception of pheromone dispersion for Ant Colony Optimization

Jos Carlos Becceneri LAC/INPE, Cx. Postal 515 12101-970 So Jos dos Campos, Brazil becce@lac.inpe.br Sandra Sandri IIIA/CSIC, Campus UAB 08193 Bellaterra, Spain sandri@iiia.csic.es Eduardo Fvero Pacheco da Luz LAC/INPE, Cx. Postal 515 12101-970 So Jos dos Campos, Brazil eduardo.luz@lac.inpe.br

ABSTRACT
It is proposed a modified version of Ant Colony System (ACS), a metaheuristic for graph like problems, that differs from its canonical implementation in the meaning that is allowed to artificial ants to deposit a certain amount of pheromone in the edges close to the main path, unlike the single deposit. The quantity of pheromone in the neighbor path is regulated by a fuzzy rule that gives more pheromone to a closer path and less pheromone to the distant one. The notion of neighborhood, or closeness, for this problem takes into account the distance and the orientation of the edges connecting the nodes. The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) was investigated in order to provide results for comparison. The results are encouraging, and reveal a large field of investigation that can be explored for solving several other graph like problems. [2] Bonabeau, E., Dorigo, M. and Theraulaz G., From natural to artificial swarm intelligence. Oxford University Press, 1999. [3] Dorigo, M., Maniezzo V. and Colorni A., The ant system: optimization by a colony of cooperating agents. IEEE Trans. SMCPartB, Vol. 26, No. 1, 1996, pp. 1-13. [4] Dorigo, M., Di Caro, G. and Gambardella L. M., Ant algorithms for discrete optimization. Artificial Life, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 137-172, 1999. [5] Dubois, D. and Prade, H., What are fuzzy rules and how to use them. Fuzzy Sets and Systems, Vol. 84, No. 2, pp. 169-185, 1996. [6] Souto, R., Campos Velho, H., Stephany, S. and Sandri, S., Reconstruction of Chlorophyll Concentration Profile in Offshore Ocean Water using a Parallel Ant Colony Code. 1st Int. Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics (HM2004/ ECAI04), Valencia (ES), 2004. [7] Becceneri, J. C. and Sandri, S., Function optimization using ant colony systems. IPMU06, Paris (FR), 2006.

References
[1] Becceneri, J. C., Extraction of energy in a nuclear reactor by ants. Proc. of the 33th Brazilian Symposium of Operational Research (SOBRAPO01), Campos do Jordo (BR), 2001.