A Novel Quantum Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a technique for mainly optimizing the discrete optimization problem. Based on transforming the discrete binary optimization problem as a "best path" problem solved using the ant colony metaphor, a novel quantum ant colony optimization (QACO) algorithm is proposed to tackle it. Different from other ACO algorithms, Q-bit and quantum rotation gate adopted in quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (QEA) are introduced into QACO to represent and update the pheromone respectively. Considering the traditional rotation angle updating strategy used in QEA is improper for QACO as their updating mechanisms are different, we propose a new strategy to determine the rotation angle of QACO. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed QACO is valid and outperforms the discrete binary particle swarm optimization algorithm and QEA in terms of the optimization ability.