Niching for Ant Colony Optimization

After what has been a fairly uphill battle I have managed to get a research paper accepted into a workshop at the 2nd International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing. The paper is titled 'Niching applied to Population-based Ant Colony Optimization'. The research applies two diversity preservation techniques from Evolutionary Computation (fitness sharing & crowding) to the Ant Colony Optimization metaheuristic (specifically population-based ant colony optimization). The purpose of maintaining 'niches' of like solutions is to ensure convergence of the ACO algorithm to multiple areas of the search space.

The paper presents a proof-of-concept with the algorithms presented alongside some very preliminary qualitative analysis. The techniques presented in the paper form the core of my PhD thesis, and as such I have already begun to apply them to more complex problems with far more rigorous analysis. Expect another paper soon on one of these algorithms applied to a far more complex suite of problems.

A larger technical report as well as demonstration software with included source code is available.