An Investigation of Some Properties of an Ant Algorithm

We have used the metaphor of ant colonies to define "the Ant system", a class of distributed algorithms for combinatorial optimization. To test the Ant system we used the travelling salesman problem. In this paper we analyze some properties of Ant-cycle, the up to now best performing of the ant algorithms we have tested. We report many results regarding its performance when varying the values of control parameters and we compare it with some TSP specialized algorithms. 1.