Ant algorithms are multi-agent systems in which the behavior of each single agent, called artificial ant or ant for short in the following, is inspired by the behavior of real ants. Ant algorithms are one of the most successful examples of swarm intelligent systems [3], and have been applied to many types of problems, ranging from the classical traveling salesman

This article presents an overview of recent work on ant algorithms, that is, algorithms for discrete optimization that took inspiration from the observation of ant colonies’ foraging behavior, and introduces the ant colony optimization (ACO) metaheuristic. In the first part of the article the basic

An analogy with the way ant colonies function has suggested the definition of a new computational paradigm, which we call Ant System. We propose it as a viable new approach to stochastic combinatorial optimization. The main characteristics of this model are positive feedback, distributed

, are derived from the principle. These two forms are compared with each other through theoretical discussions and experimental studies. The symmetric form algorithm superiority is established. A new technique, called slope constraint, is successfully introduced, in which the warping function slope

In this paper we develop a new data structure for implementing heaps (priority queues). Our structure, Fibonacci heaps (abbreviated F-heaps), extends the binomial queues proposed by Vuillemin and studied further by Brown. F-heaps support arbitrary deletion from an n-item heap in qlogn) amortized

A nonlinear differential equation of the Riccati type is derived for the covariance matrix of the optimal filtering error. The solution of this "variance equation " completely specifies the optimal filter for either finite or infinite smoothing intervals and stationary or nonstationary

In this paper we describe a new technique for general purpose interactive segmentation of N-dimensional images. The user marks certain pixels as “object” or “background” to provide hard constraints for segmentation. Additional soft constraints incorporate both boundary and region information. Graph

We present a new polynomial-time algorithm for linear programming. In the worst case, the algorithm requires O(tf'SL) arithmetic operations on O(L) bit numbers, where n is the number of variables and L is the number of bits in the input. The running,time of this algorithm is better than

The Kalman filter(KF) is one of the most widely used methods for tracking and estimation due to its simplicity, optimality, tractability and robustness. However, the application of the KF to nonlinear systems can be difficult. The most common approach is to use the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF

-based intensification and post-optimization techniques using path-relinking. Hybridizations with other metaheuristics, parallelization strategies, and applications are also reviewed.