An incremental ant colony algorithm with local search for continuous optimization

Abstract

ACOR is one of the most popular ant colony optimization algorithms for tackling continuous optimization problems. In this paper, we propose IACOR-LS, which is a variant of ACOR that uses local search and that features a growing solution archive. We experiment with Powell's conjugate directions set, Powell's BOBYQA, and Lin-Yu Tseng's Mtsls1 methods as local search procedures. Automatic parameter tuning results show that IACOR-LS with Mtsls1 (IACOR-Mtsls1) is not only a significant improvement over ACOR, but that it is also competitive with the state-of-the-art algorithms described in a recent special issue of the Soft Computing journal. Further experimentation with IACOR-Mtsls1 on an extended benchmark functions suite, which includes functions from both the special issue of Soft Computing and the IEEE 2005 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, demonstrates its good performance on continuous optimization problems.