Tutorial: ACO

1. Compare ACO and natural ants behavioral.

In real world, ants wander randomly to find food and will carry the food to the nest as
they find a food source. Ant will deposit pheromone along traveled path which is used by
other ants to follow the trail. When one ant finds a good or short path from the colony to
the food source, other ant will more likely to follow that path, and such the positive
feedback will eventually leave all the ants following single path.

Ant colony algorithm is a heuristic optimization method for shortest path and other
optimization problems which borrows ideas from biological ants. The idea of ant colony
algorithm is to mimic this behavior with “simulated ants” walking around the search
space representing the problem to be solved. Ant colony algorithms have been used to
produce near-optimal solutions to the travelling salesman problem which is to find
shortest path between n nodes.

2. Discuss ACO implementation in a TSP problem. Show each of the steps involved.

The TSP is the problem of a salesman who wants to find the best path, starting from his
home town, a shortest possible trip through a given set of customer cities and to return
to its home town. In ACO algorithms, ants are simple agents which, in the TSP case,
construct tours by moving from city to city on the problem graph. The ants’ solution
construction is guided by (artificial) pheromone trails and an a priori available heuristic
information.