An Improved Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm Based on Route Optimization and Its Applications in Travelling Salesman Problem

In this paper, we introduce two improvements on ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm: route optimization and individual variation. The first is an optimized implementation of ACO, by which the running time of ants routing is largely reduced. The results of the simulated experiments show that the improved algorithm not only reduces the number of routing in the ACO but also surpasses existing algorithms in performance in solving large-scale TSP problems. In the second improvement, we introduce individual variation to ACO, by which the ants have different routing strategies. Simulation results show that the speed of convergence of ACO algorithm could be enhanced greatly.