Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In computer science and operations research, the ant colony optimization algorithm is a probabilistic technique for solving computational problems which can be reduced to finding good paths through graphs. This algorithm is a member of ant colony algorithms family, in swarm intelligence methods, and it constitutes some metaheuristic optimizations. Initially proposed by Marco Dorigo in 1992 in his PhD thesis, the first algorithm was aiming to search for an optimal path in a graph, based on the behavior of ants seeking a path between their colony and a source of food. The original idea has since diversified to solve a wider class of numerical problems, and as a result, several problems have emerged, drawing on various aspects of the behavior of ants.