Ant Colony Search Algorithms for Optimal Packing Problem

Ant Colony optimization takes inspiration from the behavior of real ant colony to solve optimization problems. This paper presents a parallel model for ant colony to solve the optimal packing problem. The problem is represented by a directed graph so that the objective of the original problem becomes to find the shortest closed circuit on the graph under the problem-specific constraints. A number of artificial ants are distributed on the graph and communicate with one another through the pheromone trails which are a form of the long-term memory guiding the future exploration of the graph. The algorithm supports the parallel computation and facilitates quick convergence to the optimal solution. The performance of the proposed method as compared to those of the genetic-based approaches is very promising.