The Improvement of Ant Colony Algorithm and Its Application to TSP Problem

The researches and applications on ant colony algorithm have made great progress in recent years. A number of results have proved the validity of the algorithm and its advantages in some fields. However, its basic shortcomings, which are long searching time and easily jumping into local optimal solution, have not been completely solved. This paper analyzes the reasons of stagnation and then introduces a new solution for avoiding stagnation, which includes the direct exchange of pheromone of some edges and dynamically setting evaporation rate for each edge. The simulation results demonstrate that the above approach is reasonable and efficient.