The ant system applied to the quadratic assignment problem

In recent years, there has been growing interest in algorithms inspired by the observation of natural phenomena to define computational procedures tha t can solve complex problems. In this article, we describe a distributed he uristic algorithm that was inspired by the observation of the behavior of a nt colonies, and we propose its use for the Quadratic Assignment Problem. T he results obtained in solving several classical instances of the problem a re compared with those obtained from other evolutionary heuristics to evalu ate the quality of the proposed system.