A Novel Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm With Levy Flight

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a widely applied meta-heuristic algorithm. Little researches focused on the candidate selection mechanism, which was developed based on the simple uniform distribution. This paper employs the Levy flight mechanism based on Levy distribution to the candidate selection process and takes advantage of Levy flight that not only guarantees the search speed but also extends the searching space to improve the performance of ACO. Levy ACO incorporating with Levy flight developed on the top of Max-min ACO. According to the computational experiments, the performance of Levy ACO is significantly better than the original Max-min ACO and some latest Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) solvers.