Title :
The ant system applied to the quadratic assignment problem
Author :
Maniezzo, Vittorio ; Colorni, Alberto
Author_Institution :
Dipt. di Inf., Bologna Univ., Italy
Abstract :
In recent years, there has been growing interest in algorithms inspired by the observation of natural phenomena to define computational procedures that can solve complex problems. We describe a distributed heuristic algorithm that was inspired by the observation of the behavior of ant colonies, and we propose its use for the quadratic assignment problem. The results obtained in solving several classical instances of the problem are compared with those obtained from other evolutionary heuristics to evaluate the quality of the proposed system
Keywords :
combinatorial mathematics; distributed algorithms; evolutionary computation; heuristic programming; operations research; quadratic programming; ant colonies; ant system; combinatorial optimization; complex problems; computational procedures; distributed heuristic algorithm; evolutionary computation; evolutionary heuristics; knowledge pooling; natural phenomena; quadratic assignment problem; Cost function; Distributed algorithms; Electronic circuits; Evolutionary computation; Helium; Heuristic algorithms; Hospitals; Minimization; Traveling salesman problems; Wire;
Journal_Title :
Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on
