Ant Colony Optimization

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) methods are a group of metaheuristics inspired by the natural behavior of ants in search of food sources. They use the principle of pheromone communication together with local search, where individual agents (ants) deposit pheromones on routes, thereby collectively identifying and strengthening promising paths leading to optimal solutions. Getting stuck in a local minimum is prevented by the gradual evaporation of pheromones and the stochastic nature of some steps. The methods are successfully applied in solving complex combinatorial optimization problems, such as finding the shortest paths, assignment and planning problems.