Multi-agent approach to distributed ant colony optimization

This paper presents a configurable distributed architecture for ant colony optimization. We represent the problem environment as a distributed multi-agent system, and we reduce ant management to messages that are asynchronously exchanged between agents. The experimental setup allows the deployment of the system on computer clusters, as well as on ordinary computer networks. We present experimental results that we obtained by utilizing our system to solve nontrivial instances of the traveling salesman problem. The results support the effectiveness and scalability of our proposal.