Ant System with Negative for the Hospital Ward Color Planning

Inspired by the intelligent foraging behavior of ant colony, this paper proposes an improved ant colony foraging algorithm (AS-N) for complex engineering optimization problems. The main idea of AS-N is to add negative feedback. The algorithm proposed in this paper increases the negative feedback information to adjust the path selection strategy and pheromone updating mechanism. The new algorithm is tested on the hospital ward color planning problem. Statistical analysis highlights the significant performance improvement due to the life-cycle foraging strategy and shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms the reference algorithms.