Chaos-Ant Colony Algorithm and its application in continuous space optimization

Ant colony algorithm is a novel stochastic optimization algorithm using artificial ants releasing pheromone on the path, characterized with a positive feedback, distributed computation and parallel algorithm. It has strong robustness and is easy to combine with other methods in optimization. The slow step of convergence and being easy to be trapped in local optimum is the most shortcomings, although it is widely applied in optimization problems. Based on ant colony algorithm using gridding method and combined with chaos theory, chaos-ant colony algorithm is put forward. In the chaos-ant colony algorithm, some max-min ant system idea is used to limit the pheromone remained in the path. Improvements are made in initialization and update of pheromone. The feasibility of the proposed chaos-ant colony algorithm is validated by experiments. The writers of papers should and must provide normalized electronic documents in order for readers to search and read papers conveniently.