An Ant Colony Optimization Approach for the Preference-Based Shortest Path Search

Abstract The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) metaheuristic is a versatile algorithmic optimization approach based on the observation of the behaviour of ants. As a result of numerous analyses, ACO has been applied to solving various combinatorial problems. The ant colony metaheuristic proves itself to be efficient in solving NP-hard problems, often generating the best solution in the shortest amount of time. However, not enough attention has been paid to ACO as a means of solving problems that have optimal solutions which can be found using other methods. The shortest path problem is undoubtedly one of the aspects of great significance to navigation and telecommunications. It is used, amongst others, for determining the shortest route between two geographical locations, for routing in packet networks, and to balance and optimize network utilization. Thus, this article introduces ShortestPathACO, an Ant Colony Optimization based algorithm designed to find the shortest path in a graph. The algorithm consists of several subproblems that are presented successively. Each subproblem is discussed from many points of view to enable researchers to find the most suitable solutions to the problems they investigate.

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A temporal ant colony optimization approach to the shortest path problem in dynamic scale-free networks

Physica A Statistical Mechanics and its Applications ◽

10.1016/j.physa.2009.10.005 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 389 (3) ◽

pp. 629-636 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Feng Yu ◽

Yanjun Li ◽

Tie-Jun Wu

Keyword(s):

Ant Colony Optimization ◽

Shortest Path ◽

Shortest Path Problem ◽

Ant Colony ◽

Optimization Approach ◽

Scale Free ◽

Scale Free Networks

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The Map-Based Shortest Route Selection by Using Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Indonesian Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining ◽

10.24014/ijaidm.v1i1.4600 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 15

Author(s):

Achmad Fanany Onnilita Gaffar ◽

Agusma Wajiansyah ◽

Supriadi Supriadi

Keyword(s):

Ant Colony Optimization ◽

Shortest Path ◽

Optimization Algorithm ◽

Optimization Problems ◽

Google Earth ◽

Ant Colony ◽

Food Sources ◽

Shortest Route ◽

Study Results ◽

Destination Point

The shortest path problem is one of the optimization problems where the optimization value is a distance. In general, solving the problem of the shortest route search can be done using two methods, namely conventional methods and heuristic methods. The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is the one of the optimization algorithm based on heuristic method. ACO is adopted from the behavior of ant colonies which naturally able to find the shortest route on the way from the nest to the food sources. In this study, ACO is used to determine the shortest route from Bumi Senyiur Hotel (origin point) to East Kalimantan Governor's Office (destination point). The selection of the origin and destination points is based on a large number of possible major roads connecting the two points. The data source used is the base map of Samarinda City which is cropped on certain coordinates by using Google Earth app which covers the origin and destination points selected. The data pre-processing is performed on the base map image of the acquisition results to obtain its numerical data. ACO is implemented on the data to obtain the shortest path from the origin and destination point that has been determined. From the study results obtained that the number of ants that have been used has an effect on the increase of possible solutions to optimal. The number of tours effect on the number of pheromones that are left on each edge passed ant. With the global pheromone update on each tour then there is a possibility that the path that has passed the ant will run out of pheromone at the end of the tour. This causes the possibility of inconsistent results when using the number of ants smaller than the number of tours.

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