Superior/Inferior Segment-Discriminated Ant System for combinatorial optimization problems

The Ant Colony Optimization method is a heuristic algorithm for solving various optimization problems, particularly the combinatorial optimization problems. Traditional ant-optimization methods might encounter search stagnation owing to a biased pheromone map that is dominated by local optimal trails. To overcome this drawback and lower the number of solution constructions for finding the optima, this paper presents an improving ant-optimization system, the Superior/Inferior Segment-Discriminated Ant System (SDAS). This system proposes a segment-based pheromone update strategy to deposit pheromone on superior segments and withdraw pheromone from inferior ones. The method uses the control-chart technique to define superior and inferior limits to partition the constructed solutions into superior, inferior, and ordinary solutions. Inferior and superior segments are then extracted from the superior and inferior solutions by stochastic set operations. Since the pheromone map is not easily dominated by any local optimal trail, the solution search is more efficient and effective. Several benchmarks from the TSP-LIB and OR-LIB were used as sample problems to test the proposed system against other ant-optimization systems, including the AS, ACS, AS_rank, AS_elite, and MMAS. Numerical results indicated that the SDAS obtains solutions that are similar to or better than others. Maturity index for the pheromone map was discussed and experimental results showed that the proposed method was able to prolong the time for the map to maturity to avoid earlier search stagnation.