Integrating Evolutionary Computation Components in Ant Colony Optimization

Abstract

This chapter introduces two different ways to integrate Evolutionary Computation Components in Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) Meta-heuristic. First of all, the ACO meta-heuristic is introduced and compared to Evolutionary Computation to notice their similarities and differences. Then two new models of ACO algorithms that include some Evolutionary Computation concepts (Best-Worst Ant System and exchange of memoristic information in parallel ACO algorithms) are presented with some empirical results that show improvements in the quality of the solutions when compared with more basic and classical approaches.