Ant colony system with communication strategies

In this paper an ant colony system (ACS) with communication strategies is developed. The artificial ants are partitioned into several groups. Seven communication methods for updating the pheromone level between groups in ACS are proposed and work on the traveling salesman problem using our system is presented. Experimental results based on three well-known traveling salesman data sets demonstrate the proposed ACS with communication strategies are superior to the existing ant colony system (ACS) and ant system (AS) with similar or better running times. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.