Counter-Based Ant Colony Optimization as a Hardware-Oriented Meta-heuristic

In this paper, we present the Counter-based Ant Colony Optimization (C-ACO) algorithm as a meta-heuristic, which allows for a resource-efficient implementation on Field Programmable Gate Arrays. In comparison to the standard ACO approach in software on a sequential machine, the implementation of C-ACO in hardware leads to significant asymptotic speed-ups. In experimental studies, we investigate the performance of the proposed C-ACO algorithm. Furthermore, we introduce and examine alternative means of integrating heuristic information into the optimization process, thereby considering the requirements of the hardware architecture.