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 that can solve complex problems. In this article, we describe a distributed heuristic algorithm that was inspired by the observation of the behavior of ant colonies, and we propose its use for the Quadratic Assignment Problem. The results obtained in solving several classical instances of the problem are compared with those obtained from other evolutionary heuristics to evaluate the quality of the proposed system.
ant system quadratic assignment problem heuristic algorithms distributed algorithms evolutionary computation combinatorial optimization knowledge pooling