Towards Termination Criteria of Ant Colony Optimization

Ant colony optimization (ACO for short) has been proved a successful meta-heuristic by a huge of empirical studies. This paper discusses the termination criteria of ACO and therefore provides research ideas to other meta-heuristics. A general discussion about four types of termination criteria has been firstly discussed in this article. Then some measures of convergence based on pheromone have been introduced. And a new termination criterion based on Bayesian approach is presented. Finally a new convergence proof for a class of ACO algorithms is presented.