ACO for Continuous and Mixed-Variable Optimization

This paper presents how the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) metaheuristic can be extended to continuous search domains and applied to both continuous and mixed discrete-continuous optimization problems. The paper describes the general underlying idea, enumerates some possible design choices, presents a first implementation, and provides some preliminary results obtained on well-known benchmark problems. The proposed method is compared to other ant, as well as non-ant methods for continuous optimization.

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