An improved ant colony optimization algorithm for solving a complex combinatorial optimization problem

This paper presents an improved ant colony optimization algorithm (IACO) for solving mobile agent routing problem. The ants cooperate using an indirect form of communication mediated by pheromone trails of scent and find the best solution to their tasks guided by both information (exploitation) which has been acquired and search (exploration) of the new route. Therefore the premature convergence probability of the system is lower. The IACO can solve successfully the mobile agent routing problem, and this method has some excellent properties of robustness, self-adaptation, parallelism, and positive feedback process owing to introducing the genetic operator into this algorithm and modifying the global updating rules. The experimental results have demonstrated that IACO has much higher convergence speed than that of genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA), and basic ant colony algorithm, and can jump over the region of the local minimum, and escape from the trap of a local minimum successfully and achieve the best solutions. Therefore the quality of the solution is improved, and the whole system robustness is enhanced. The algorithm has been successfully integrated into our simulated humanoid robot system which won the fourth place of RoboCup2008 World Competition. The results of the proposed algorithm are found to be satisfactory.