Improving the Ant System: A Detailed Report on the MAX-MIN Ant System
Thomas St�tzle, Holger H. Hoos · 1996
Ant System is a general purpose heuristic algorithm inspired by the foraging behavior of real ant colonies. Here we introduce an improved version of Ant System, that we called MAX– MIN Ant System. We describe the new features present in MAX–MIN Ant System, make a detailed experimental investigation on the contribution of the design choices to the improved performance and give computational results for the application to symmetric and asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problems. The performance of MAX–MIN Ant System can be further improved by adding a local search phase in which some ants are allowed to improve their solution.