ANT COLONIES FOR THE TRAVELING SALESMAN PROBLEM

We describe an artificial ant colony capable of solving the travelling salesman problem (TSP). Ants of the artificial colony are able to gen erate successively shorter feasible tours by using information accumul ated in the form of a pheromone trail deposited on the edges of the TS P graph. Computer simulations demonstrate that the artificial ant colo ny is capable of generating good solutions to both symmetric and asymm etric instances of the TSP. The method is an example, like simulated a nnealing, neural networks and evolutionary computation, of the success ful use of a natural metaphor to design an optimization algorithm. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.