Simulating Study on the Principle of Ant Colony Algorithm

Inspiration from the foraging behavior of ant colony, a novel simulated evolutionary algorithm called ant colony algorithm (ACA) had been proposed by Italian researcher M. Dorigo el al.. Preliminary study had shown that the ACA algorithm was very robust and had great capabilities in searching better solution. In this paper, a real ant colony simulating algorithm (RACSA) which directly simulates the foraging behavior of ant colony, is proposed. The research on factors such as the importance of pheromone, evaporation coefficient of pheromone, amount of ant and the pheromone quantity deposited by ants is performed by simulated experiments and the results will be guidelines to theoretic research and design of other ant colony algorithms.