Towards a multilevel ant colony optimization

Masteroppgave i Informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi IKT590 Universitetet i Agder 2014 Ant colony optimization is a metaheuristic approach for solving combinatorial optimization problems which belongs to swarm intelligence techniques. Ant colony optimization algorithms are one of the most successful strands of swarm intelligence which has already shown very good performance in many combinatorial problems and for some real applications. This thesis introduces a new multilevel approach for ant colony optimization to solve the NP-hard problems shortest path and traveling salesman. We have reviewed different elements of multilevel algorithm which helped us in construction of our proposed mu…