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	An introduction to Ant Colony Algorithms Introduction Ant Colony Algorithms Solving the Travelling Salesman Problem The Algorithm Results Other applications Further reading

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Ant Colony Algorithms are a relatively new idea and it can be quite hard to locate good papers on the subject. Below I provide you with examples of interesting as well as successful applications.

• Scheduling : Scheduling is a widespread problem of practical importance. An online example can be found at the University of Leeds Computer Science department. This is a bus driver scheduling application written by Paul Forsyth & Anthony Wren. Available in postscript and html.
• Telecommunication Networks : Network routing refers to the activity of creating, maintaining and using routing tables (one for each node in the network) to determine where to direct an incoming data stream so that it can continue its travel through the network. In telecommunications this is an extremely difficult problem because of the constant changes in network traffic load. This is where the adaptive advantages of the Ant Colony methology can help. A good example is available as a technical report by G. DiCaro and Marco Dorigo from IRIDA, Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
• Vehicle Routing Problem : This obviously bears some resemblance with the Travelling Salesman Problem discussed in the previous section. Here we have to take more considerations into account. For instance in the example introduced here, there is an issue of vehicle carrying capacity. Bernd Mullenheimer, Richard Hartl and Christine Strauss have created an Ant Algorithm for a vehicle routing problem

In order to make use of the Ant Colony methology we must be able to reformulate our problem as some kind of path seeking in a graph and identify an appropriate way to define the distances between nodes. Obviously this limits the application areas somewhat. However, I have already presented you with four applications, three of which belong to very important practical application areas. Other areas that seem likely as possible future application domains are web search, pattern recognition and data mining.

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Comments : Johann Bragi Fjalldal

Last modified: Mon Feb 15 09:41:08 GMT 1999