Use of chaotic sequences in a biologically inspired algorithm for engineering design optimization

Recent computational developments in ant colony systems have proved fruitful for transforming discrete domains of application into continuous ones. In this paper, new combinations of an ant colony inspired algorithm (ACA) and chaotic sequences (ACH) are employed in well-studied continuous optimization problems of engineering design. Two case studies are described and evaluated in this work. Our results indicate that ACA and ACH handle such problems efficiently in terms of precision and convergence and, in most cases, they outperform the results presented in the literature. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.