A common interval guided ACO algorithm for permutation problems

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has been successfully applied to many combinatorial optimization problems. In this work we propose a new solution construction scheme for ACO. This scheme uses the common intervals of the current iteration´s best solutions to guide the ants during solution construction. Firstly, we compared the performance of ACO and the proposed algorithm Common Interval ACO (CIACO). Secondly, we conducted an in-depth study for the CIACO algorithm to investigate the influence of the common interval guidance. For both experiments a large parameter space was used. The results show, that common intervals can be used to improve the solution quality in comparison to the standard ACO algorithm.