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.

Interesting Links

I came across an interesting blog on metaheuristics by Johann Dréo called "Dreaming of Metaheuristsics". It is new so there is not much content yet, although there are some interesting posts on swarm related research in particular the one on ACO authorship (Dan!).

I also came across some interesting work on evolving flying creatures with path following behaviour in a 3D environment, includes a brief and link to the paper "Evolving Flying Creatures with Path Following Behaviors" (2006?). There is further information and publications about this work on Yoon Sik Shim’s homepage.

Finally I have uploaded new versions of the function optimisation and combinatorial optimisation software, so check them out. The major additions to both are different versions of Population-based ACO approaches thanks to Dan.

jase.

Master Hans

Congratulations to our Hans who on Friday submitted his Masters thesis! For this momentous occasion, we went down the on campus bar to celebrate and inebriate. See below for photos of the proud father and the group.



Well done Hans!!!

P.S. Thanks go to Irene for capturing the moment.