A Population-Based Ant Colony Optimization Approach for DNA Sequence Optimization

DNA computing is a new computing paradigm which uses bio-molecular as information storage media and biochemical tools as information processing operators. It has shows many successful and promising results for various applications. Since DNA reactions are probabilistic reactions, it can cause the different results for the same situations, which can be regarded as errors in the computation. To overcome the drawbacks, much works have focused to design the error-minimized DNA sequences to improve the reliability of DNA computing. In this research, Population-based ACO (P-ACO) is proposed to solve the DNA sequence optimization. P-ACO approach is a meta-heuristic algorithm that uses some ants to obtain the solutions based on the pheromone in their colony. The DNA sequence design problem is modelled by four nodes, representing four DNA bases (A, T, C, and G). The results from the proposed algorithm are compared with other sequence design methods, which are Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA) methods. The DNA sequences optimized by the proposed approach have better result in some objective functions than the other methods.