A hybrid ant colony optimization for continuous domains

Research on optimization in continuous domains gains much of focus in swarm computation recently. A hybrid ant colony optimization approach which combines with the continuous population-based incremental learning and the differential evolution for continuous domains is proposed in this paper. It utilizes the ant population distribution and combines the continuous population-based incremental learning to dynamically generate the Gaussian probability density functions during evolution. To alleviate the less diversity problem in traditional population-based ant colony algorithms, differential evolution is employed to calculate Gaussian mean values for the next generation in the proposed method. Experimental results on a large set of test functions show that the new approach is promising and performs better than most of the state-of-the-art ACO algorithms do in continuous domains. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.