An Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for Solving Travelling Salesman Problem

Ant colony optimization (ACO) has been widely used for different combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we investigate ACO algorithms with respect to their runtime behavior for the traveling salesperson (TSP) problem. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a heuristic algorithm which has been proven a successful technique and applied to a number of combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is one of the most important combinatorial problems. There are several reasons for the choice of the TSP as the problem to explain the working of ACO algorithms it is easily understandable, so that the algorithm behavior is not obscured by too many technicalities; and it is a standard test bed for new algorithmic ideas as a good performance on the TSP is often taken as a proof of their usefulness.