Chapter 1: From Real to Artificial Ants
Background
Terminology
- Stigmergy: communication by modifying the environment -
pheromone trails
- Autocatalytic feedback: positive feedback
- Convergence: the probability of a selected path becoming
arbitrarily close to 1
Artificial Ant Ingredients
- Probabilistic solution construction based on pheromone trails
- Limited form of memory
- Deterministic pheromone trail update based on solution quality
- Pheromone trails decay over time
- Exploration vs. Exploitation tradeoff
S-ACO: Simple Ant Colony Optimization
- Equation 1.8: probability of selecting a particular trail
- Equation 1.9: pheromone update
- Equation 1.10: pheromone decay
- Table 1.1: importance of using path length in pheromone update
- Figure 1.10: importance of a proper decay setting
- In general, parameter settings (such as α) are important for
good results