An Improved Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm Based on Hybrid Strategies for Scheduling Problem

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 7; pp. 20281 - 20292
• Main Authors: Deng, Wu, Xu, Junjie, Zhao, Huimin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: ACO; Algorithms; Ant colony optimization; assignment problem; Co-evolution mechanism; Convergence; Diffusion rate; Evolution; Heuristic algorithms; hybrid strategy; Operations research; Optimization; pheromone diffusion mechanism; pheromone updating strategy; Pheromones; Scheduling; Sociology; Statistics; Strategy; Traveling salesman problem
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2897580

In this paper, an improved ant colony optimization(ICMPACO) algorithm based on the multi-population strategy, co-evolution mechanism, pheromone updating strategy, and pheromone diffusion mechanism is proposed to balance the convergence speed and solution diversity, and improve the optimization performance in solving the large-scale optimization problem. In the proposed ICMPACO algorithm, the optimization problem is divided into several sub-problems and the ants in the population are divided into elite ants and common ants in order to improve the convergence rate, and avoid to fall into the local optimum value. The pheromone updating strategy is used to improve optimization ability. The pheromone diffusion mechanism is used to make the pheromone released by ants at a certain point, which gradually affects a certain range of adjacent regions. The co-evolution mechanism is used to interchange information among different sub-populations in order to implement information sharing. In order to verify the optimization performance of the ICMPACO algorithm, the traveling salesmen problem (TSP) and the actual gate assignment problem are selected here. The experiment results show that the proposed ICMPACO algorithm can effectively obtain the best optimization value in solving TSP and effectively solve the gate assignment problem, obtain better assignment result, and it takes on better optimization ability and stability.