Ant Systems

This article describes Ant Systems, a meta-heuristic based on an ant foraging metaphor. The presentation of Ant Systems has been somewhat generalized by adding a ``Queen" process in charge of co-ordinating classical ``Ant" processes, so that recent Ant Systems can be naturally included while remaining close to the metaphor. To illustrate how Ant Systems are practically implemented, a number of applications to the quadratic assignment problem are reviewed.