Ant colony optimization algorithm design and its FPGA implementation

In this paper, a Hardware/Software (HW/SW) co-design method of ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is proposed to implement on the FPGA chip. In this paper, the software is designed with C language and hardware is designed with Verilog hardware description language (HDL). The HW/SW co-design method is a technique based on a SOPC (System on a Programmable Chip). In this paper, the path selecting and path analysis are designed in SOPC. The path selecting belongs to the pre-processing of the ACO algorithm and it cost a longer computing processing time. Therefore, a hardware circuit is designed to speed up processing. The path analysis will be designed by the C language within the NIOS II processor. In the experimental results, the processing time can be reduced by the proposed method.