An ant colony optimization based layout optimization algorithm

Ant colony optimization (ACO) has been applied to several NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems with considerable success while little experience is available on continuous constrained optimization problems. In this paper ACO was adopted in the solution of a layout optimization problem with dynamic constraints. A quasi traveling salesman problem (TSP) model was introduced for local layout improvement by a discretization approach and its ACO based optimization algorithm was then developed. The proposed methodology demonstrates its feasibility and validity on a numerical example.