A new ant colony optimization for the knapsack problem

Abstract

The knapsack problem is one of the classical NP-hard problems in operations research. It has been thoroughly studied in the last few decades and several exact algorithms for its solution can be found in the literature. In this paper, we propose a new ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm for solving the knapsack problem. Comparing with the basic ACO, this improved algorithm combines inner mutation and outer mutation that make it more effective and efficient in solving the knapsack problem. Numerical example is presented to illustrate the model