Ant Colony Optimisation for Continuous and Mixed-Variable Domains

Ant colony optimization (ACO) has become one of the§popular metaheuristics used for tackling optimisation§problems. Its popularity grows steadily, and the area§of applications constantly widens. Recent research§shows that ACO is competitive and applicable to§various real-world optimisation problems. ACO has§been initially developed to handle only the discrete§optimisation problems. In this work, we present a way§to extend ACO, so that it can also be applied to both§continuous and mixed-variable optimisation problems. §We initially focus only on the continuous case.§Following an extensive analysis of the performance of§ACO extended to continuous domains, we present how it§may be further adapted to handle both continuous and§discrete variables simultaneously. We thus introduce§the first native mixed-variable§version of an ACO algorithm.§The book is recommended for all those interested in§novel approaches to heuristic optimisation and ways§to practically tackle difficult optimisation§problems. The ideas described are tested on§real-world example problems, which allows better§understanding and demonstrates the advantages of the§approach.