A novel pheromone update with important solution components

The pheromone information in ACO are used to reflect the ants´ search experience, and the ants exploit them to probabilistically construct solutions to the problem, so the quality of the pheromone is crucial to the success of ACO. Based on the fact that the contribution of different components of solution is distinct, they should be handled differently during pheromone update. This paper introduces a new policy of pheromone update: the important solution components are firstly identified before the good solution is exploited to update the pheromone information, then only the important solution components are allowed to receive more pheromone. The pheromone trails updating in this novel policy will more exactly reflect the character of high quality solution, so it will speed the positive feedback procedure. This is verified by deceptive problem.