A study on ant colony optimization (ACO)

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a paradigm for designing metaheuristic algorithm for combinational optimization problems. It is a way to solve optimization problems based on the way that ants indirectly communicate directions to each other. The behavior of ants has been documented and the subject of easily writing and fables passed from one century to another century. The successful techniques used by ant colonies have been studied in computer science and robotics to produce distributed and fault tolerance system for solving problems as well as used in fault tolerance storage and networking algorithm. Metaheuristic algorithms are algorithms which, in order to escape from local optima, drive some basic heuristic: either a constructive heuristic, starting from the null solution and adding elements to build a good complete one, or local search heuristic, starting from a complete solution and iteratively modifying some of its elements in order to achieve a better one.