An Improved Ant Colony Algorithm for Traveling Salesman Problem

In view of the disadvantages of the basic ant colony algorithm in solving non-deterministic polynomial problems, such as slow convergence rate and local optimal solution. In this paper, the updating rules of pheromone and the updating strategy of target city in ant colony algorithm are improved, and an improved ant colony algorithm (IACA) is proposed. In addition, it is applied to the shortest traversal path search of travel salesman problem. Taking 33 provincial capitals and berlin52 problems as test objects, this paper compares the search efficiency of the proposed algorithm with that of the basic ant colony algorithm. It can be seen from the simulation results that IACA has a faster convergence rate than the basic ant colony algorithm. IACA is obviously superior to the basic ant colony algorithm in terms of convergence and the quality of the optimal solution. It provides a new choice for solving similar optimization problems.