Max-min ant colony optimization for design of water distribution system

Ant colony optimization algorithms(ACOAs),which are evolutionary methods of imitating the ants' activities of searching for food,have been applied in many fields concerning combinational optimization problems.In order to improve the ability of ACOAs in the optimal design of water distribution systems,the modified ACOAs were developed,in which binary-coded method was used.Only one ant was allowed to provide a feedback mechanism by updating the trails and the trails were limited to an interval between some maximum and minimum possible values.The new methods were applied to a simple network optimization problem and the results that were better than those from the simple ACOAs were obtained.