Modified Ant Colony Algorithm for Solving Engineering Optimization Problems

Abstract

This paper presents ant colony optimization - ACO. After presenting the biological basis of ASO, it explains the method itself and then the main algorithms of the ASO method as well as their mathematical models. The "Modified Ant Colony Algorithm" (MACA) is presented in detail as well as the manner of its operation and it application to optimization examples of engineering problems, such as: optimization of spring, pressure vessel, welded beam and speed reducer. At the end, the results obtained by the MASM method are compared to the results previously obtained by other methods.