This algorithm is a member of ant colony algorithms family, in swarm intelligence methods, and it constitutes some metaheuristic optimizations. Initially proposed by Marco Dorigo in 1992 in his PhD thesis, the first algorithm was aiming to search for an optimal path in a graph, based on the behavior of ants seeking a path between their colony and a source of food. The original idea has since diversified to solve a wider class of numerical problems, and as a result, several problems have emerged, drawing on various aspects of the behavior of ants.
Overview
In the real world, ants (initially) wander randomly, and upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails. If other ants find such a path, they are likely not to keep travelling at random, but to instead follow the trail, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food (see Ant communication).
Over time, however, the pheromone trail starts to evaporate, thus reducing its attractive strength. The more time it takes for an ant to travel down the path and back again, the more time the pheromones have to evaporate. A short path, by comparison, gets marched over faster, and thus the pheromone density remains high as it is laid on the path as fast as it can evaporate. Pheromone evaporation has also the advantage of avoiding the convergence to a locally optimal solution. If there were no evaporation at all, the paths chosen by the first ants would tend to be excessively attractive to the following ones. In that case, the exploration of the solution space would be constrained.
Thus, when one ant finds a good (i.e., short) path from the colony to a food source, other ants are more likely to follow that path, and positive feedback eventually leads all the ants following a single path. The idea of the ant colony algorithm is to mimic this behavior with "simulated ants" walking around the graph representing the problem to solve.
Detailed
The original idea comes from observing the exploitation of food resources among ants, in which ants’ individually limited cognitive abilities have collectively been able to find the shortest path between a food source and the nest.
- The first ant finds the food source (F), via any way (a), then returns to the nest (N), leaving behind a trail pheromone (b)
- Ants indiscriminately follow four possible ways, but the strengthening of the runway makes it more attractive as the shortest route.
- Ants take the shortest route, long portions of other ways lose their trail pheromones.
In a series of experiments on a colony of ants with a choice between two unequal length paths leading to a source of food, biologists have observed that ants tended to use the shortest route. A model explaining this behaviour is as follows:
- An ant (called "blitz") runs more or less at random around the colony;
- If it discovers a food source, it returns more or less directly to the nest, leaving in its path a trail of pheromone;
- These pheromones are attractive, nearby ants will be inclined to follow, more or less directly, the track;
- Returning to the colony, these ants will strengthen the route;
- If there are two routes to reach the same food source then, in a given amount of time, the shorter one will be traveled by more ants than the long route;
- The short route will be increasingly enhanced, and therefore become more attractive;
- The long route will eventually disappear because pheromones are volatile;
- Eventually, all the ants have determined and therefore "chosen" the shortest route.
Ants use the environment as a medium of communication. They exchange information indirectly by depositing pheromones, all detailing the status of their "work". The information exchanged has a local scope, only an ant located where the pheromones were left has a notion of them. This system is called "Stigmergy" and occurs in many social animal societies (it has been studied in the case of the construction of pillars in the nests of termites). The mechanism to solve a problem too complex to be addressed by single ants is a good example of a self-organized system. This system is based on positive feedback (the deposit of pheromone attracts other ants that will strengthen it themselves) and negative (dissipation of the route by evaporation prevents the system from thrashing). Theoretically, if the quantity of pheromone remained the same over time on all edges, no route would be chosen. However, because of feedback, a slight variation on an edge will be amplified and thus allow the choice of an edge. The algorithm will move from an unstable state in which no edge is stronger than another, to a stable state where the route is composed of the strongest edges.
The basic philosophy of the algorithm involves the movement of a colony of ants through the different states of the problem influenced by two local decision policies, viz., trails and attractiveness. Thereby, each such ant incrementally constructs a solution to the problem. When an ant completes a solution, or during the construction phase, the ant evaluates the solution and modifies the trail value on the components used in its solution. This pheromone information will direct the search of the future ants. Furthermore, the algorithm also includes two more mechanisms, viz., trail evaporation and daemon actions. Trail evaporation reduces all trail values over time thereby avoiding any possibilities of getting stuck in local optima. The daemon actions are used to bias the search process from a non-local perspective.
