Topological communication network design using ant colony optimization

In this paper, ant colony optimization (ACO) is proposed to solve the optimal telecommunication networks design considering both economics and reliability. ACO is a new cooperative agent approach, which is inspired by the observation of the behaviors of real ant colonies on the topic of ant trial formation and foraging methods. In the ACO, a set of cooperating agents called "ants" cooperates to find good solution. The advantages of ACO are parallel search and optimization capabilities. This approach is interested on the model of the reality telecommunication network. Simulation results on multiple test problems with various degrees of constraint show that this approach has high efficiency and is superior to the conventional tabu search algorithm (TSA)