Modelling altruistic and selfish behavioural properties of Ant Colony Optimisation

Cooperativeness/competitiveness and altruism/selfishness are two key pairs of factors that could be adopted by natural algorithms in order to experience significant variations as well as to improve the quality of the existing solutions. Identifying the individual and social components separately and fine tuning the use of said behaviours of natural ants is worth investigating with regards to the behaviours of artificial ants in Ant Colony Optimisation. According to the experimental results of this study, it can be shown that the solutions are affected by these two key pairs of factors of ants and the colonies while their corresponding influences can make differences in the solution quality of the algorithm. This research has attempted to adapt the said behaviours of ants to solve two general issues of Evolutionary Algorithms, decreasing the delay in convergence and premature convergence. Travelling Salesman Problem is used as the reference problem.