A Method to Solve the Traveling Salesman Problem Using Ant Colony Optimization Variants with Ant Set Partitioning

In this paper we propose an ant’s partition method for Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), a meta-heuristic that is inspired in ant’s behavior and how they collect their food. The proposed method equivalently divides the total number of ants in three different subsets and each one is evaluated separately by the corresponding variation of ACO (AS, EAS, MMAS) to solve different instances of The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). This method is based on the idea of “divide and conquer” to be applied in the division of the work, as the ants are evaluated in different ways in the same iteration. This method also includes a stagnation mechanism that stops at a certain variation if it’s not working properly after several iterations. This allows us to save time performing tests and have less overhead in comparison with the conventional method, which uses just one variation of ACO in all iterations.