Quantum ant colony optimization with application

Aiming at the shortcoming of ant colony optimization of being only suitable for discrete problems and holding a slow convergence speed, a novel algorithm for continuous optimization problems is presented. In this algorithm, each ant carries a group of qubits which represents the position of its own. First, the destination to which ant want to move is selected according to the select probability based on pheromone information and heuristic information. Then, the ant's own qubits are updated by quantum rotation gates so as to move. Some ants' qubits are mutated by quantum non-gate so as to increase the diversity of positions. Finally, both information of the pheromone and the heuristic are updated according to the new position of each ant. In this algorithm, both probability amplitudes of a qubit are regarded as position information, a double searching efficiency is acquired for ant colony which hold the fixed number of ants. The availability of the proposed algorithm is illustrated by simulation examples of function extremum optimization.