SamACO: Variable sampling ant colony optimization algorithm for continuous optimization

Xiao Min Hu*, Jun Zhang, Henry Shu Hung Chung, Yun Li, Ou Liu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

63 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

An ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm offers algorithmic techniques for optimization by simulating the foraging behavior of a group of ants to perform incremental solution constructions and to realize a pheromone laying-and-following mechanism. Although ACO is first designed for solving discrete (combinatorial) optimization problems, the ACO procedure is also applicable to continuous optimization. This paper presents a new way of extending ACO to solving continuous optimization problems by focusing on continuous variable sampling as a key to transforming ACO from discrete optimization to continuous optimization. The proposed SamACO algorithm consists of three major steps, i.e., the generation of candidate variable values for selection, the ants' solution construction, and the pheromone update process. The distinct characteristics of SamACO are the cooperation of a novel sampling method for discretizing the continuous search space and an efficient incremental solution construction method based on the sampled values. The performance of SamACO is tested using continuous numerical functions with unimodal and multimodal features. Compared with some state-of-the-art algorithms, including traditional ant-based algorithms and representative computational intelligence algorithms for continuous optimization, the performance of SamACO is seen competitive and promising.

Original languageEnglish
Article number5443623
Pages (from-to)1555-1566
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics
Volume40
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2010
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Ant algorithm
  • ant colony optimization (ACO)
  • ant colony system (ACS)
  • continuous optimization
  • function optimization
  • local search
  • numerical optimization

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