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Title

Anti-pheromone as a tool for better exploration of search space

Author(s)

Montgomery, James;  Randall, Marcus

Abstract

Many animals use chemical substances known as pheromones to induce behavioural changes in other members of the same species. The use of pheromones by ants in particular has lead to the development of a number of computational analogues of ant colony behaviour including Ant Colony Optimisation. Although many animals use a range of pheromones in their communication, ant algorithms have typically focused on the use of just one, a substance that encourages succeeding generations of (artificial) ants to follow the same path as previous generations. Ant algorithms for multi-objective optimisation and those employing multiple colonies have made use of more than one pheromone, but the interactions between these different pheromones are largely simple extensions of single criterion, single colony ant algorithms. This paper investigates an alternative form of interaction between normal pheromone and anti-pheromone. Three variations of Ant Colony System that apply the anti-pheromone concept in different ways are described and tested against benchmark travelling salesman problems. The results indicate that the use of anti-pheromone can lead to improved performance. However, if anti-pheromone is allowed too great an influence on ants' decisions, poorer performance may result.

Publication type

Conference paper

Source

Lecture Notes in Computer Science : Ant Algorithms : Proceedings 3rd International Workshop on Ant Algorithms (ANTS 2002), Brussels, Belgium, 12-14 September 2002, Vol. 2463, p. 100-110

Publication year

2002

Keyword(s)

ACO;  Algorithms;  Animal models;  Ant colony optimisation;  Biologically-inspired computing;  Constructive metaheuristic;  Machine learning;  Nature-inspired computing;  Pheromone model;  Solution bias;  Travelling salesman problem

Publisher

Springer

ISBN

9783540441465

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45724-0_9

Copyright

Copyright © Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2002. The author's final draft of this paper is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.

Full text

Peer reviewed