Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Parallelization Of Ant Colony Optimization Via Area Of Expertise Learning, Adrian A. De Freitas

Theses and Dissertations

Ant colony optimization algorithms have long been touted as providing an effective and efficient means of generating high quality solutions to NP-hard optimization problems. Unfortunately, while the structure of the algorithm is easy to parallelize, the nature and amount of communication required for parallel execution has meant that parallel implementations developed suffer from decreased solution quality, slower runtime performance, or both. This thesis explores a new strategy for ant colony parallelization that involves Area of Expertise (AOE) learning. The AOE concept is based on the idea that individual agents tend to gain knowledge of different areas of the search space …