改进蚁群算法-论文阅读：Improving Ant Colony Optimization Efficiency for Solving Large TSP Instances

论文地址：https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02228.pdf

1.概述

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a family of nature-inspired metaheuristics often applied to finding approximate solutions to difficult optimization problems. Despite being significantly faster than exact methods, the ACOs can still be prohibitively slow, especially if compared to basic problem-specific heuristics. As recent research has shown, it is possible to significantly improve the performance through algorithm refinements and careful parallel implementation benefiting from multi-core CPUs and dedicated accelerators. In this paper, we present a novel ACO variant, namely the Focused ACO (FACO). One of the core elements of the FACO is a mechanism for controlling the number of differences between a newly constructed and a selected previous solution. The mechanism results in a more focused search process, allowing to find improvements while preserving the quality of the existing solution. An additional benefit is a more efficient integration with a problem-specific local search. Computational study based on a range of the Traveling Salesman Problem instances shows that the FACO outperforms the state-of-the-art ACOs when solving large TSP instances. Specifically, the FACO required less than an hour of an 8-core commodity CPU time to find high-quality solutions (within 1% from the best-known results) for TSP Art Instances ranging from 100 000 to 200 000 nodes.

蚁群优化 (ACO) 是一系列受自然启发的元启发式算法，通常用于寻找困难优化问题的近似解。尽管比精确方法快得多，ACO 仍然可能非常缓慢，特别是与基本的特定问题启发式相比。作为最近研究表明，通过算法改进可以显着提高性能以及受益于多核 CPU 和专用加速器的仔细并行实施。在这个在论文中，我们提出了一种新的 ACO 变体，即 Focused ACO (FACO)。的核心要素之一FACO 是一种用于控制新建和选定的差异数量的机制以前的解决方案。该机制导致更集中的搜索过程，允许找到改进同时保持现有解决方案的质量。另一个好处是更有效地集成针对特定问题的本地搜索。基于一系列旅行商问题的计算研究实例表明，在解决大型 TSP 实例时，FACO 的性能优于最先进的 ACO。具体来说，FACO 需要不到一个小时的 8 核商品 CPU 时间来找到高质量的解决方案（与最知名的结果相差 1% 以内）适用于 100 000 到 200 000 的 TSP 实例节点。

2.The MAX-MIN Ant System

3.Focused ACO for Solving Large Problem Instances

4. 2-opt LS used in the main loop of the FACO

5.实验参数设置

6.实验结果