Ant System: An Autocatalytic Optimizing Process

A combination of distributed computation, positive feedback and constructive greedy heuristic is proposed as a new approach to stochastic optimization and problem solving. Positive feedback accounts for rapid discovery of very good solutions, distributed computation avoids premature convergence, and greedy heuristic helps the procedure to find acceptable solutions in the early stages of the search process. An application of the proposed methodology to the classical travelling salesman problem shows that the system can rapidly provide very good, if not optimal, solutions. We report on many simulation results and discuss the working of the algorithm. Some hints about how this approach can be applied to a variety of optimization problems are also given.