Ant Colony Optimization - A Novel Approach to Solve NP-Hard Problems
Many of numerous species of insects that
Keywords: Ant colony, Swarm, TSP
Abstract
The complex social behaviours of ants have
been much studied, and computer scientists
are now finding that these behaviour patterns
can provide models for solving difficult
combinatorial optimization problems. The
attempt to develop algorithms inspired by
one aspect of ant behavior, the ability to find
shortest paths, has become the field of ant
colony optimization (ACO). The ant colony
optimization algorithm (ACO), introduced by
Marco Dorigo, in the year 1992, is a
probabilistic technique for solving
computational problems which can be
reduced to finding good paths through
graphs. This paper presents an overview of
this rapidly growing field, from its theoretical
inception to practical applications, including
descriptions of many available ACO
algorithms and their various applications to
solve NP-Hard Problems. In this paper, we
also discuss the Travelling Salesman
Problem.
1. Introduction.
1.1 Behaviour of Social Animals
Insects are the most diverse group of
animals on the earth. Many insects possess
very sensitive organs of perception.
perception. Swarm Intelligence(SI) is an
artificial technique based on the study of
collective, self-organized systems. SI systems
live in colonies manifest group integration
and division of labour. Swarm intelligence
are typically made up of a population of
simple agents interacting locally with one
another and with their environment.
Although there is normally no centralized
control structure dictating how individual
agents should behave, local interactions
between such agents often lead to the
emergence of global behaviour.
The rest of the paper is divided as follows:
Sections 1.2 and 1.3 discuss the Ant Colony
and other Social Insect Behaviour
approaches. Section 2 gives a theoretical
overview and an example of ACO. Variants
of ACO are briefly explained in Section 3.
In Section 4, the application aspects of
ACO to real world problems is discussed
with emphasis on the TSP. The next section
gives the merits and demerits of ACO.
Finally the conclusion and references are
given.
1.2 Ant Colonies
Ant Communication is accomplished
primarily through chemicals called
pheromones. Ants communicate to one
another by laying down pheromones along
their trails. Other ants perceive the presence
of pheromone and tend to follow paths
where pheromone concentration is higher.
Over time, however, the pheromone trail
starts to evaporate, thus reducing its
attractive strength. The more time it takes
for an ant to travel down the path and back
again, the more time the pheromones have
to evaporate. A short path gets marched
over faster, and thus the pheromone density
remains high as it is laid on the path as fast
as it can evaporate.

Figure 1:Ant Behaviour
A. Ants in a pheromone trail between nest
and food; B. An obstacle interrupts the trail;
C. Ants find two paths to go around the
obstacle; D. A new pheromone trail is formed
along the shorter path.
Pheromone evaporation has also the
advantage of avoiding the convergence to a
locally optimal solution. If there were no
evaporation at all, the paths chosen by the
first ants would tend to be excessively
attractive to the following ones. In that case,
the exploration of the solution space would
be constrained. Thus, when one ant finds a
good path to a food source, other ants are
more likely to follow that path, and positive
feedback eventually leaves all the ants
following a single path. Figure 1 describes
this ant behaviour.
1.3 Other Social Insects for
Optimization
Examples of other optimisation systems
which can be found in nature include bird
flocking, animal herding, bacteria moulding
and fish schooling, pedestrians, traffic. The
beauty of the entire phenomenon lies in the
seemingly intelligent group behaviour that
emerges from multiple individual animals.
2. Ant Colony Optimization.
2.1 The Theory of Ant Colonies
The distinctive behaviour of ants has been
extensively studied and has inspired a
number of methods and techniques among
which the most successful is the general
purpose optimization technique known as
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). ACO
exploits a similar mechanism similar to that
of the foraging behaviour of some ant
species. From the early nineties, when the
first ant colony optimization algorithm was
first proposed, ACO attracted the attention
of increasing numbers of researchers and
many successful applications are now
available. Moreover, a substantial corpus of
theoretical results is becoming available
that provides useful guidelines to
researchers and practitioners in further
applications of ACO
2.2 Characteristics of ACO
Stigmergy is a method of communication
in systems in which the individual parts of
the system communicate with one another
by modifying their local environment. The
two main characteristics of stigmergy that
differentiate it from other forms of
communication are:
(i) Stigmergy is an indirect, non-
symbolic form of communication
mediated by the environment:
insects exchange information by
modifying the environment; and
(ii) Stigmergic information is local: it
can only be accessed by those
insects that visit the locus in which
it was released (or its immediate
neighbourhood)
2.3 The Double Bridge Experiment
Deneubourg et al. thoroughly investigated
the behaviour of ants. In an experiment
known as the “double bridge
experiment”( Figure 2) the nest of a
colony of Argentine ants was connected to
a food source by two bridges of equal
lengths. In such a setting, ants start to
explore the surroundings of the nest and
eventually reach the food source. Along their
paths, the ants deposit pheromone. Initially,
each ant randomly chooses one of the two
bridges. However, due to random
fluctuations, after some time, one of the two
bridges presents a higher concentration of
pheromones than the other and , thus, attracts
more ants. This brings a further amount of
pheromone on that bridge making it more
attractive with the result that after some time
the whole colony converges towards the use
of the same bridge.
This colony–level behaviour based on
autocatalysis , that is , on the exploitation of
positive feedback , can be used by ants to
find the shortest path between a food source
and their nests. A variant of the “double
bridge experiment”, in which one bridge is
significantly longer than the other was
considered. In this case, the stochastic
fluctuations in the initial choice of a bridge
are much reduced and a second mechanism.
Figure 2: Experimental Setup for the
double bridge experiment (a) branches
have equal lengths;(b) branches have
different lengths.
plays an important role: the ants choosing
by chance the short bridge are the first to
reach the nest. The short bridge, therefore,
receives pheromone earlier than the long
one and this fact increases the probability
that further ants select it rather than the
long one. A model of this observed
behaviour was developed.
2.4 ACO Procedure - Pseudo Algorithm
The ACO pseudo-algorithm is shown
below. After initialization, the algorithm
iterates over three phases: at each iteration,
a number of solutions are constructed by
the ants; these solutions are then improved
through a local search (this step is
optional), and finally the pheromone is
updated.
1. (Initialization)
Set parameters, initialize pheromone
trails.
Initialize τιψ, for each ι,ψ
2. (Construction of AntSolution)
For each ant k do
Repeat
Compute ηιψ for each ι,ψ.
Choose in probability the state to
move into
Append the chosen move to move
the kth ant’s set tabu.
Until ant k has completed its
solution.
[apply a local search(optional)]
3. (Pheromone Trail Update)
For each ant move ( ι,ψ) do
Compute ∆τιψ and update the trail
values
4. (Terminating condition)
If not (end_condition) go to step-2.
3. Variants of the ACO Algorithm.
 Different ant colony optimization algorithms
have been proposed .The original ACO
algorithm is known as Ant System and was
proposed in the early nineties. It’s main
characteristic is that at each iteration, the
pheromone values are updated by all the ants
that have built a solution in the iteration
itself.
Since then a number of other ACO
algorithms, variants of the original Ant
System, were presented, of which the two
most successful algorithms were MAXMIN
and Ant Colony system (ACS).
MAXMIN is an improvement over the
original AntSystem. Its characterizing
elements are that only the best ant updates
the pheromone trails and that the value of the
pheromone is bound.
The most interesting contribution of ACS is
the introduction of a local pheromone update
in addition to the pheromone update
performed at the end of the construction
process. The local update done diversifies
the search performed by subsequent ants
during an iteration: by decreasing the
pheromone concentration on the traversed
edges, ants encourage subsequent ants to
choose other edges an, hence, to produce
different solutions. This makes it less likely
that several ants produce identical solutions
during one iteration.
4. Applications of ACO in NP-Hard
Problems.
In recent years, the interest of the scientific
community in ACO has risen sharply. In fact,
several successful applications of ACO to a
wide range of different discrete optimization
problems are now available. The large
majority of these applications are to NP-
Hard problems; that is, to problems for
which the best known algorithms that
guarantee to identify an optimal solution
have exponential time worst case
complexity. The use of such algorithms is
often infeasible in practice, and ACO
algorithms can be useful for quickly
finding high quality solution. Other
popular applications are to dynamic
shortest path problems arising in
telecommunication networks problems.
The number of successful applications to
academic problems has motivated people
to adopt ACO for the solution of industrial
problems, proving that this computation of
intelligence technique is also useful in real
world applications.
4.1 Application to telecommunication
networks
ACO algorithms have shown to be a very
effective approach for routing problems in
telecommunication networks where the
properties of the system, such as the cost of
using links or the availability of the nodes,
vary over time. ACO algorithms were first
applied to routing problems in circuit-
switched networks (such as telephone
networks) and then in packet-switched
networks (such as local area networks or
the internet). A well known example is
AntNet which has been extensively tested,
in simulation, on different networks and
under different traffic patterns, proving to
be highly adaptable and robust. A
comparison with state-of-the-art routing
algorithms has shown that, in most of the
considered situations, AntNet outperforms
its competitors.
Ant-based algorithms have given rise to
several other routing algorithms, enhancing
performance in a variety of wired network
scenarios.
4.2 Application to Industrial Problems
The success of ACO on academic
problems has raised the attention of a
number of companies that have started to
sue ACO algorithms for real-world
applications. They have applied ACO to a
number of scheduling problems such as a
continuous two-stage flow shop problem
with finite reservoirs. The problems modeled
included various real world constraints such
as setup times, capacity restrictions, resource
compatibilities and maintenance calendars.
Some researchers have developed a set of
tools for the solution of vehicle-routing
problems whose optimization algorithms are
based on ACO. Examples of companies who
have successfully used ACO are EuroBios,
AntOptima, DYVOIL, AntRoute, Migros
(the main Swiss supermarket chain) and
Barilla (the main Italian pasta maker).
4.3 Conventional ACO for the Travelling
Salesman Problem (TSP)
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a
problem in discrete or combinatorial
optimization. It is a prominent illustration of
a class of problems in computational
complexity theory which are hard to solve.
The problem states that : Given a number of
cities and the costs of traveling from any city
to any other city, what is the cheapest round-
trip route that visits each city exactly once
and then returns to the starting city?
In ant colony optimization, the problem is
tackled by simulating a number of artificial
ants moving on a graph that encodes the
problem itself: each vertex represents a city
and each edge represents a connection
between two cities. A variable called
pheromone is associated with each edge and
can be read and modified by ants. Ant colony
optimization is an iterative algorithm. At each
iteration , a number of artificial ants are
considered. Each of them builds a solution by
walking from vertex to vertex on the graph
with the constraint of not visiting any vertex
that she has already visited in her walk. At
each step of the solution construction, an ant
selects the following vertex to be visited
according to a stochastic mechanism that is
biased by the pheromone: when in vertex i,
the following vertex is selected
stochastically
among the previously unvisited ones. In
particular, if j has not been previously
visited, it can be selected with a probability
that is proportional to the pheromone
associated with the edge (i,j). At the end of
the iteration, on the basis of the quality of
the solution constructed by the ants, the
pheromone values are modified in order to
bias ants in future iterations to construct
solutions similar to the best ones previously
constructed. In Figure 3, ACO-TSP is
given.
Figure 3 :An ant in city i chooses the next
city to visit via a stochastic mechanism: If j
has not been previously visited, it can be
selected with a probability that is
proportional to the pheromone associated
with edge (i.j).
Many of the tackled NP-Hard problems can
be considered as falling into one of the
following categories: routing problems as
they arise for example in the distribution of
goods; assignment problems, where a set of
items (objects, activities etc.) has to be
assigned to a given number of
resources(location, agents etc.)subject to
some constraints; scheduling problems ,
which –in the widest sense- concerned with
the allocation of scare resources to tasks
over time; and subset problems , where a
solution to a problem is considered to be a
selection of a subset of available items. In
addition, ACO has been successfully applied
to other problems emerging in fields such as
machine learning and bioinformatics.

5. The Merits and Demerits of ACO.

Some of the inherent advantages of ACO

algorithms are as follows :
• The Positive Feedback in ACO
accounts for rapid discovery of good
solutions
• ACO employs Distributed
computation, which avoids premature
convergence.
• The greedy heuristic used in ACO
helps find an acceptable solution in
the early solution in the early stages
of the search process.
Some of the disadvantages in ACO
algorithms are:
• These algorithms have slower
convergence than other Heuristics.
• They performed poorly for TSP
problems larger than 75 cities.
• There is no centralized processor to
guide the Ant System towards good
solutions.
SOCIAL INSECTS AND REAL ANT
COLONIES
In a colony of social insects, such as ants,
bees, wasps, and termites, each insect usually
performs its own tasks independently from
other members of the colony. However, the
tasks performed by different insects are
related to each other in such a way that the
colony, as a whole, is capable of solving
complex problems through cooperation [2].
Important survival related problems such as
selecting and picking up materials, and
finding and storing food, which require
sophisticated planning, are solved by insect
colonies without any kind of supervisor or
centralized controller. This collective
behavior which emerges from a group of
social insects has been called “swarm
intelligence” [2].
Here, we are interested in a particular
behavior of real ants namely, the fact that
they are capable of finding the shortest path
between a food source and the nest (adapting
to changes in the environment) without the
use of visual information [9]. This intriguing
ability of almost-blind ants has been studied
extensively by ethologists. They discovered
that, in order to exchange information about
which path should be followed, ants
communicate with one another by means of
pheromone (a chemical substance) trails. As
ants move, a certain amount of pheromone is
dropped on the ground, marking the path
with a trail of this substance. The more ants
follow a given trail, the more attractive this
trail becomes to be followed by other ants.
This process can be described as a loop of
positive feedback, in which the probability
that an ant chooses a path is proportional to
the number of ants that have already passed
by that path [9], [11], [23].
When an established path between a food
source and the ants’ nest is disturbed by the
presence of an object, ants soon try to go
around the obstacle. First, each ant can
choose to go around to the left or to the right
of the object with a 50%–50% probability
distribution. All ants move roughly at the
same speed and deposit pheromone in the
trail at roughly the same rate. Therefore, the
ants that (by chance) go around the obstacle
by the shortest path will reach the original
track faster than the others that have
followed longer paths to circumvent the
obstacle. As a result, pheromone
accumulates faster in the shorter path
around the obstacle. Since ants prefer to
follow trails with larger amounts of
pheromone, eventually all the ants
converge to the shorter path.
III. ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION
An ACO algorithm is essentially a system
based on agents that simulate the natural
behavior of ants, including mechanisms of
cooperation and adaptation. In [10], the use
of this kind of system as a new
metaheuristic was proposed in order to
solve combinatorial optimization problems.
This new metaheuristic has been shown to
be both robust and versatile—in the sense
that it has been applied successfully to a
range of different combinatorial
optimization problems [11].
ACO algorithms are based on the
following ideas.
1) Each path followed by an ant is
associated with a candidate solution for a
given problem.
2) When an ant follows a path, the amount
of pheromone deposited on that path is
proportional to the quality of the
corresponding candidate solution for the
target problem.
3) When an ant has to choose between two
or more paths, the path(s) with a larger
amount of pheromone have a greater
probability of being chosen by the ant. As a
result, the ants eventually converge to a
short path, hopefully the optimum or a
near-optimum solution for the target
problem, as explained before for the case of
natural ants. In essence, the design of an
ACO algorithm involves the specification of
[2]:
1) an appropriate representation of the
problem, which allows the ants to
incrementally construct/modify solutions
through the use of a probabilistic transition
rule, based on the amount of pheromone in
the trail and on a local problem-dependent
heuristic;
2) a method to enforce the construction of
valid solutions, i.e., solutions that are legal in
the real-world situation corresponding to the
problem definition;
3) a problem-dependent heuristic function (
) that measures the quality of items that can
be added to the current partial solution;
4) a rule for pheromone updating, which
specifies how to modify the pheromone trail (
);
5) a probabilistic transition rule based on the
value of the heuristic function () and on the
contents of the pheromone trail () that is used
to iteratively construct a solution.
Artificial ants have several characteristics
similar to real ants, namely:
1) artificial ants have a probabilistic
preference for paths with a larger amount of
pheromone;
2) shorter paths tend to have larger rates of
growth in their amount of pheromone;
3) the ants use an indirect communication
system based on
the amount of pheromone deposited on each
path.
 [3] Official website of the Ant Colony
6. Conclusion Metaheuristic: www.aco-metaheuristic.org

Ant Colony Optimization has been and [4] Other Related links:
continues to be a fruitful paradigm for www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intellig
designing effective combinatorial ence
optimization solution algorithms. After more
than ten years of studies, both its application
effectiveness and its theoretical groundings
have been demonstrated, making ACO one of
the most successful paradigm in the
metaheuristic area.
Fifteen years ago, when the first ACO
algorithm was introduced, taking inspiration
from ants for designing optimization
algorithms seemed a crazy idea. The many

successful applications have changed our

perspective: what seemed a far-out idea is
now considered one of the most promising
approaches to the approximate solution of
difficult optimization problems.
This paper is a brief write-up of the ideas and
inspirations behind ACO. The effectiveness
of ACO is justified by the variety of
applications of ACO. This being an emerging
field of the Swarm Intelligence area, much
more exploration and experimentation can be
done in future.

7. References

[1] Marco Dorigo, Mauro Birattari, and

Thomas Stiitzli, “Ant Colony Optimization:
Artificial Ants as a Computational
Intelligence Technique”, IEEE Transaction
on Evolutionary Computation, November
2006, pp. 28-36.

[2] J.-L.Deneubourg, S.Aron, S.Goss, and J.-

M.Pasteels, “The Self Organizing
Exploratory Pattern of the Argentine Ant”,
Journal of Insect Behaviour, Vol.3, p.159,
1990.