Dynamic adaptation of the ACS-TSP local pheromone decay parameter based on the Hidden Markov Model

The objective of the present paper is to propose an improved Ant Colony System (ACS) algorithm based on a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) so as dynamically adapt the local pheromone decay parameter ξ. The proposed algorithm uses Iteration and Diversity as indicators of the hidden states in the search space in ACS. To test the efficiency of our algorithm, we experimented it on several benchmark Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) instances. The results have proven the effectiveness of our algorithm in both the convergence speed and the solution quality.