An Improved Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm And Its Application In Solving Traveling Salesman Problem

In this thesis, we present a novel improvement and results for a computational paradigm called Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). We begin with the introduction of some related topics, including the Combinatorial Optimization and the conception of NP-hard, using the Traveling Salesman Problem as an example. Some famous Heuristic Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization are described briefly and the method of colony intelligent solving the same problem along with its advantages is also given. Then we introduce the background and the details of Ant Colony Optimization. Among the applications of ACO, we emphasize some existing methods solving TSP problem by ACO. The new improvements and results of ACO solving TSP problem are presented at last, which are the main contributions of the thesis. The researches and applications on ACO algorithm have made great progresses in the past ten years. A number of results prove the validity of the algorithm and its advantages in some fields. Its basic shortcomings, which are long searching time and easily jumping into local optimal solution, have been overcome partially and some...