Abstract
This article introduces Ant Systems, a meta-heuristic based on an ant foraging metaphor. The presentation of Ant Systems has been somewhat generalized by adding a “Queen” process in charge of coordinating classical “Ant” processes, so that recent Ant Systems can be naturally included while remaining close to the metaphor. To illustrate how Ant Systems are practically implemented, a number of applications to the quadratic assignment problem are reviewed.
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Taillard, É.D. (2000). An Introduction to Ant Systems. In: Laguna, M., Velarde, J.L.G. (eds) Computing Tools for Modeling, Optimization and Simulation. Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces Series, vol 12. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4567-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4567-5_7
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