Exploiting Antipheromone in Ant Colony Optimisation for Interactive Search-Based Software Design and Refactoring
Chris Simons, Jim Smith · 2016
Preventing user-fatigue in interactive meta-heuristic search places as great an emphasis on efficiency as it does on effectiveness. Engagement may also be boosted if the system provides a sense of "responsiveness" - for example, avoiding unpopular solutions as well as exploiting preferred ones. In this paper we explore one possible way of achieving these goals using the concept of "anti-pheromones" in different forms of Ant Colony Optimisation. Taking search-based software design and refactoring as a case study, we use extensive offline experiments to investigate differences of timescale and method for applying anti-pheromones. Results confirm our predictions that most combinations are in fact counter-productive. However, applying high levels of anti-pheromone, only in the initial stages of a run, can rapidly steer the search away from unproductive regions, reducing the number of evaluations required by up to 20% without compromising solution fitness.