Ant Colony Optimisation for Continuous and Mixed-Variable Domains

ISBN-13: 9783639164336 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 188 str.

Krzysztof Socha

Opis

Ant colony optimization (ACO) has become one of thepopular metaheuristics used for tackling optimisationproblems. Its popularity grows steadily, and the areaof applications constantly widens. Recent researchshows that ACO is competitive and applicable tovarious real-world optimisation problems. ACO hasbeen initially developed to handle only the discreteoptimisation problems. In this work, we present a wayto extend ACO, so that it can also be applied to bothcontinuous and mixed-variable optimisation problems. We initially focus only on the continuous case.Following an extensive analysis of the performance ofACO extended to continuous domains, we present how itmay be further adapted to handle both continuous anddiscrete variables simultaneously. We thus introducethe first native mixed-variableversion of an ACO algorithm.The book is recommended for all those interested innovel approaches to heuristic optimisation and waysto practically tackle difficult optimisationproblems. The ideas described are tested onreal-world example problems, which allows betterunderstanding and demonstrates the advantages of theapproach.

O autorze

Krzysztof Socha was born in 1975 in Poland. After finishing AGH
University, he emigrated to Belgium, where he obtained his Ph.D.
at ULB in 2008. His research interests focus on practical
heuristic optimisation methods. He has published several papers
and contributed to a few book chapters on the topic.