Ant colony optimization

ANT COLONY OTIMIZATION basics and algorithm 3.1. ACO algorithm introduction and basics The concept of ACO has been inspired by observation of real ants while wondering for food source. An ant while in search of food source lays a certain amount of pheromone trail along the path traversed. The laying of pheromone serves dual purpose to the ant. Firstly, it marks the path for other randomly moving aunts and secondly, it helps the aunt to return to its original source. Now, whenever a redundantly moving aunt senses pheromone fragments it is likely that it will follow the same path and hence by mechanism of positive feedback this new aunt lays more pheromone on that path. The amount of pheromone laid by the new aunt will intensifies the amount of already present pheromone trail on a specific…

In this project, Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is studied. VRP is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. It appears in a large number of real world situations, such as transportation of people and products, delivery services, garbage collection etc. It can be applied everywhere, for vehicles, trains, plains; that is why Vehicle Routing Problem is of great practical importance in real life. The Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) are the ones concerning the distribution of goods between…

Swarm behavior is one of the main characteristics of different colonies of social insects (bees, wasps, ants, termites). This type of behavior is first and foremost characterized by autonomy, distributed functioning and self-organizing. Swarm Intelligence, SI, is considered to be the area of Artificial Intelligence that is based on studying actions of individuals in various decentralized systems~\cite{bonabeau1999}. However, there is still today big discrepancy between two schools of thought in…

Hi, Aaron here from the Leiningen plantation in southern Brazil. We are witnessing, first hand, the world’s largest army attempt to take on 400+ men armed with farm supplies and tools, ANTS! Every few years, an ant colony will expand outside its normal exploring territory and move all the way across South America. This colony arises other colonies along the way and builds their army of mass destruction. This swarm can grow up to 2 miles wide, and 10 miles long. That’s 20 square miles!! This…

After reading the essays “The Myth of the Ant Queen”, “Project Classroom Makeover”, and “The Naked Citadel” by Steven Johnson, Cathy Davidson, and Susan Faludi, readers may have spotted that collective knowledge, different systems of organization, and the three terms identity, conformity and group mentality, are mentioned in their respective essays. Interestingly enough, these three completely different essays still have ideas that can work together to address a point: collective knowledge can…

When she emerges, she builds a small nest and rears a starter brood of worker females. These workers then take over expanding the nest, building multiple six-sided cells into which the queen continually lays eggs. By late summer, a colony can have more than 5,000 individuals, all of whom, including the founding queen, die off at winter. Only newly fertilized queens survive the cold to restart the process in spring. Solitary wasps, by far the largest subgroup, do not form colonies. This group…

Hypothesis 1.) Ants prefer food sources of a higher quality rather than of a lower quality. 2.) Ants are sensitive to foraging gains and predation risks. Predictions 1.) Ants will prefer to forage for sugar water that is highly concentrated rather than water that is less concentrated. 2.) Ants will prefer to forage close to their home net site rather than farther away from their home nest site. 3.) Ants will balance the trade-off between the risk of predation and food quality. Ants will take…

2.3.2 PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION (PSO) Particle Swarm Optimization [27] is a population-based stochastic optimization developed by Dr. Ebehart and Dr. Kennedy in 1995, inspired by social behavior of bird flocking or fish schooling. In PSO, each single solution is a “bird” (particle) in the search space of food (the best solution). All particles have fitness values evaluated by the fitness function (the cost function for ELD problem), and have velocities that direct the “flying” (or evaluation)…

Society is a monarchy, with different levels of “power”. With the Queen’s Society, the ants were assigned different tasks. Near the beginning of the movie, you can see worker ants digging a tunnel. These ants were assigned the job a “worker ant”. The “worker ant” is in my opinion the lowest level of power in the society. There were also soldier ants shown throughout the movie. On a higher level, there is The General and his accomplices. This is the most successful society because ants…

In Dr Deborah Gordon tech talk, “How Ant Colonies Get Things Done” she presents her findings from studying a collection of ant colonies in New Mexico for the past 25 years. More specifically, she focus on the Red Carpenter ant species. While colonies of ants may look at first glance like simply a bunch of ants running around aimlessly, a closer and more careful look shows substantial social organization. A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest…