Improved cooperative Ant Colony Optimization for the solution of binary
combinatorial optimization applications
Abstract
Binary combinatorial optimization plays a crucial role in various
scientific and engineering fields. While deterministic approaches have
traditionally been used to solve these problems, stochastic methods,
particularly metaheuristics, have gained popularity in recent years for
efficiently handling large problem instances. Ant Colony Optimization
(ACO) is among the most successful metaheuristics and is frequently
employed in non-binary combinatorial problems due to its adaptability.
Although for binary combinatorial problems ACO can suffer from issues
such as rapid convergence to local minima, its eminently parallel
structure means that it can be exploited to solve large and complex
problems also in this field. In order to provide a versatile ACO
implementation that achieves competitive results across a wide array of
binary combinatorial optimization problems, we introduce a parallel
multicolony strategy with an improved cooperation scheme to maintain
search diversity. We evaluate our proposal (Binary Parallel Cooperative
ACO, BiPCACO) using a comprehensive benchmark framework, showcasing its
performance and, most importantly, its flexibility as a successful
all-purpose solver for binary combinatorial problems.