Wisdom of Artificial Crowds—A Metaheuristic Algorithm for Optimization

Finding optimal solutions to NP-Hard problems requires exponential time with respect to the size of the problem. Consequently, heuristic methods are usually utilized to obtain approximate solutions to problems of such difficulty. In this paper, a novel swarm-based nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm for optimization is proposed. Inspired by human collective intelligence, Wisdom of Artificial Crowds (WoAC) algorithm relies on a group of simulated intelligent agents to arrive at independent solutions aggregated to produce a solution which in many cases is superior to individual solutions of all participating agents. We illustrate superior performance of WoAC by comparing it against another bio-inspired approach, the Genetic Algorithm, on one of the classical NP-Hard problems, the Travelling Salesperson Problem. On average a 3% - 10% improvement in quality of solutions is observed with little computational overhead.

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