3 ANT SYSTEMS
Ant System introduced by Dorigo (Dorigo, 1991).
Dorigo's artificial ants (called ants) have some major
differences with real (natural). First, ants have a
memory. Second, ants are not completely blind.
While natural ants rely on chemical signals to
navigate. Finally, due to obvious constraints
imposed by the architecture of current computers,
artificial ants live in a world where time is discrete
(Islam, 2005). In the case of Travel salesman
Problem (TSP)
- Ants have a memory; this memory is used to
store a list of previously visited cities.
- Ants are not completely blind. Ants are aware
of the distance between cites.
To examine the ant algorithms, apply them to the
well-known travelling salesman problem (TSP) (E.
L. Lawler, 1985)
3.1 Ant System and Travel Salesman
Problem (TSP)
Given a set of n towns, the TSP problem can be
stated as the problem of finding a minimal length
closed tour that visits each town once. The distance
between town i and town j is calculated by
Euclidean distance equation (2).
x
x
y
y
(2)
An instance of the TSP problem is given by a
weighted graph (N,E), where N is the set of towns
and E is the set of edges between towns, weighted
by the distances. assume b
t
i1,...,n is the
number of ants in town i at time t. Then the total
number of ants is calculated by equation (3)
m
∑
b
t
(3)
Each ant is a simple agent with the following
characteristics:
• When going from town i to town j it lays a
substance, called trail, on edge (i,j);
• It chooses the town to go to with a probability
that is a function of the town distance and of the
amount of trail present on the connecting edge.
• Each ant has a data structure, called a tabu list.
That memorizes the towns already visited up to
time t and forbids the ant to visit them again
before a tour has been completed. When a tour is
completed the tabu list is emptied and the ant is
free again to choose its way. The vector
containing the tabu list of the k-th ant is tabu
k
and tabu
k
(s) is the s-th element of the tabu list of
the k-th ant. Let
(t) be the intensity of trail on
edge (i,j) at time t. At each iteration of the
algorithm trail intensity becomes
τ
t1
ρ.τ
t
∆τ
t,t 1
(4)
where ρ is a coefficient such that 1 ρ represents
the evaporation of trail. The coefficient ρ must be set
to a value <1 to avoid unlimited accumulation of
trail
∆τ
t,t 1
∑
∆τ
t,t 1
(5)
where ∆τ
t,t 1 is the quantity per unit of length
of trail substance (pheromone in real ants) laid on
edge (i,j) by the k-th ant between time t and t+1.
The transition probability from town i to town j for
the k-th ant is
p
t
τ
α
.η
β
∑
τ
α
.η
β
if j allowed
0 otherwise
(6)
where allowed = {j is not in tabu
k
} and η
is the
visibility of town j from town i, which is simply the
value 1/ d
ij
. Where
α and β are parameters that allow
a user to control the relative importance of trail
versus visibility. Therefore the transition probability
is a tradeoff between visibility (which says that close
towns should be chosen with high probability) and
trail intensity (that says that if on edge (i,j) there has
been a lot of traffic then it is highly desirable, thus
implementing the autocatalytic process).
Different choices about how to compute ∆τ
t,t
1
and when to update the τ
t
cause different
Instantiations of the ant algorithm. In the next two
sections Dorigo (Dorigo, 1991) present the three
approaches. Dorigo (Dorigo, 1991) used as
experimental test-bed for ideas, namely Ant-density,
Ant-quantity, and Ant-cycle.
3.2 The Ant-density and Ant-quantity
Approaches
Initially, two approaches where developed by
Dorigo (Dorigo, 2000) to exploit his Ant System
heuristic named : Ant-density and Ant-quantity. In
the Ant-density approach a quantity Q1 of trail for
every unit of length is left on edge (i,j) every time an
ant goes from i to j; in the Ant-quantity approach an
ant going from i to j leaves a quantity Q2/dij of trail
for every unit of length.
ANT PAGERANK ALGORITHM
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