Ergonomic Modelling and Optimization of the Keyboard Arrangement with an Ant Colony Algorithm

The arrangement of letters on a keyboard greatly influences the comfort and the typing speed of the user. With repetitive muscular injuries emerging and the amount of text to be treated increasing, the need for a better arrangement has come forth. In order to solve the problem of this arrangement an abstract representation of a keyboard is introduced. Having justified the choice of heuristic ergonomic criteria, a mathematical function for the ergonomic evaluation criteria is developed. Based on the Ant Colony Optimization algorithm an optimization algorithm is designed and applied to the described problem. The computational results representing the quality of the obtained keyboard arrangements for several languages are finally discussed and new solutions for the keyboard optimization problem are given.