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Summary: A sensor network is a situation‐based critical network defined under certain restrictions and constraints. The clustered architecture is defined over these networks to utilize the criticality vectors and to improve network communication. In this paper, a degree load‐balanced and fuzzy‐ACO (DLB‐fACO) protocol is proposed for optimizing the clustered architecture. In this architecture, the load analysis is performed while forming the clusters. The cluster head selection is performed based on energy, cluster density, and probability vector. The node degree‐ and energy‐balanced analysis is performed for identifying the cluster members. Once the clusters are formed, the ACO approach is applied to perform the cluster‐based hierarchical routing. Communication is performed at two levels. In the first level, node‐to‐cluster head communication is performed by considering energy and degree consideration. In the second level, the fuzzy‐integrated ACO method is applied for inter‐cluster route formation. The route optimization is here performed under fuzzy‐based energy, degree, and distance parameters. These fuzzy parameters are evaluated within the ACO algorithm for generating the optimized route. The proposed load‐balanced protocol is analyzed against the LEACH, LEACH‐C, LEACH‐CC, M‐LEACH, Fuzzy‐PSO, Fuzzy‐ACO, Fuzzy‐Cuckoo, and FMCB‐ER protocols. The experimentation results confirm the significant gain in network lifetime and packet communication. The cluster count, clustering switching, and communication failure are also reduced in comparison with existing conventional and optimized protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the gradual expansion of college scale, the professional categories in colleges and universities are becoming more and more complete, and the volume of courses is becoming more and more huge. In the meantime, the number of students is growing by leaps and bounds, and the teaching resources are subject to more and more complicated teaching tasks. The workload and the difficulty of scheduling in teaching management are also on the rise year by year. This paper proposes a design of a college scheduling algorithm based on an improved genetic ant colony hybrid optimization algorithm. Firstly, the fitness-enhanced elimination law is proposed to improve the selection process of traditional genetic algorithms. Subsequently, the gene infection crossover method is proposed to ensure the increase of the average fitness value in the evolutionary process. Next, the unnecessary replication operation in the traditional genetic algorithm is removed to enhance the operation speed of the algorithm. Finally, the parallel mechanism of fuzzy adaptive is introduced to improve the convergence and stability of the algorithm. For the ant colony optimization algorithm, a nonuniform pheromone distribution is used according to the position of the current raster relative to the starting point, which makes the initial pheromone concentration of the dominant raster higher and avoids blind search by ants. The ant movement rules are redefined by the directional neighborhood expansion strategy to further shorten the path. The experimental results indicate that the hybrid optimization algorithm outperforms other algorithms in terms of performance in terms of scheduling success and scheduling time, and it can be applied in practical scheduling because of the high quality of courses schedule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a meta-heuristic algorithm, the ant colony algorithm has been successfully used to solve various combinatorial optimization problems. However, the existing algorithm that takes the power of ants to solve distributed constraint optimization problems (ACO_DCOP) is easy to fall into local optima. To deal with this issue, this paper presents an adaptive ant colony algorithm based on local information entropy to solve distributed constraint optimization problems, named LIEAD. In LIEAD, the local information entropy is introduced to help agents adaptively select the pheromone update strategy and value selection strategy, which improves the convergence speed and the quality of the solution. Moreover, a restart mechanism is designed to break the accumulation state of pheromone, which increases the population diversity and helps the algorithm jump out of the local optima. The extensive experimental results indicate that LIEAD can significantly outperform ACO_DCOP and is competitive with the state-of-the-art DCOPs algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to improve the efficiency and adaptability of cognitive radar jamming decision-making, a fusion algorithm (Ant-QL) based on ant colony and Q-Learning is proposed in this paper. The algorithm does not rely on a priori information and enhances adaptability through real-time interactions between the jammer and the target radar. At the same time, it can be applied to single jammer and multiple jammer countermeasure scenarios with high jamming effects. First, traditional Q-Learning and DQN algorithms are discussed, and a radar jamming decision-making model is built for the simulation verification of each algorithm. Then, an improved Q-Learning algorithm is proposed to address the shortcomings of both algorithms. By introducing the pheromone mechanism of ant colony algorithms in Q-Learning and using the ε -greedy algorithm to balance the contradictory relationship between exploration and exploitation, the algorithm greatly avoids falling into a local optimum, thus accelerating the convergence speed of the algorithm with good stability and robustness in the convergence process. In order to better adapt to the cluster countermeasure environment in future battlefields, the algorithm and model are extended to cluster cooperative jamming decision-making. We map each jammer in the cluster to an intelligent ant searching for the optimal path, and multiple jammers interact with each other to obtain information. During the process of confrontation, the method greatly improves the convergence speed and stability and reduces the need for hardware and power resources of the jammer. Assuming that the number of jammers is three, the experimental simulation results of the convergence speed of the Ant-QL algorithm improve by 85.4%, 80.56% and 72% compared with the Q-Learning, DQN and improved Q-Learning algorithms, respectively. During the convergence process, the Ant-QL algorithm is very stable and efficient, and the algorithm complexity is low. After the algorithms converge, the average response times of the four algorithms are 6.99 × 10−4 s, 2.234 × 10−3 s, 2.21 × 10−4 s and 1.7 × 10−4 s, respectively. The results show that the improved Q-Learning algorithm and Ant-QL algorithm also have more advantages in terms of average response time after convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to construct an efficient and reliable global path for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), this paper proposes a USV global path planning algorithm based on an optimized ant colony algorithm (OACA). The algorithm constructs a USV global path planning model by comprehensively considering energy consumption costs and turning control costs. In order to ensure the adaptability of the model to the task environment, the USV's motion characteristics are analyzed with full consideration of external interference, and on this basis, the characterization of energy consumption costs and turning control costs is completed. In order to obtain the global optimal solution of the model and accelerate the convergence speed of the model, in the initialization process of the ant colony algorithm, the initial pheromone is distributed unevenly by introducing the distance relationship among the intermediate node, the starting point, and ending point to improve the initial search efficiency. In the iterative process of searching for the optimal solution, enhancing the guidance effect of the current optimal solution on the offspring ants by introducing a weight factor to improve the update rule of pheromone, which accelerates the convergence speed of the algorithm. In the last two steps of the deadlock path, the number of lost ants is reduced by introducing a penalty factor to punish the pheromone which can guarantee the diversity of ants, and the algorithm's premature convergence is overcome. The simulation results prove the effectiveness of this algorithm. © 2022 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to improve the optimization effect of traditional ant colony algorithm in solving traveling salesman problem, this paper developed a dual-ant colony optimization algorithm with dynamic differentiation and neighborhood induction mechanism. Firstly, the algorithm introduced chaotic random strategy, and changed the original greedy strategy in the initialization stage of the algorithm to chaotic distribute the initial pheromone, so as to maintain the diversity of the population and improve the accuracy of the solution. Secondly, the algorithm divided the isolated ants in the ant colony into isolated ant colony and normal ant colony, and the two groups of ants searched around the current optimal path and the outlier path respectively. It adopted the induction mechanism among the populations. Normal ants were responsible for searching the optimal path, and isolated ants released pheromones randomly in chaos to induce the normal ant colony to a new path, thus effectively balancing the contradiction between the convergence rate and the diversity of solutions. The simulation results of different scale TSP show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major problems of transport logistics is planning optimal delivery routes. Solving this problem leads to combinatorial optimizations that require complex computations. The present research considers an asymmetric problem of transport routing with a limitation of the carrying capacity of transport facilities, the duration of the route, and a heterogeneous transport facilities fleet. An algorithm for solving the routing problem based on the ant colony method is proposed. The web application that has been developed implements the proposed algorithm for solving this problem. The obtained optimal routes were compared with the results of route building by other cartographic services. The proposed algorithm showed the best result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the problem of slow search speed and insufficient solution quality of ant colony algorithm, this paper proposed an ant colony algorithm combining dynamic hierarchical clustering and neighborhood interval reorganization. In the ini-tial stage, the algorithm adjusted the hierarchical clustering threshold and iterated to the target cluster based on the principle of minimum inter-cluster distance merging, and then merged the clusters according to the pre-merging coefficient. In the next place it used ant colony system to generate subclass paths, disconnected and reorganized the initial paths to improve the overall convergence speed of the algorithm. Then the algorithm used ant colony system to optimize the solution space, and at the same time, carried out neighborhood interval diffusion reorganization between clusters to increase the diversity of solutions. Furthermore, if the quality of the reconstructed solution was better than the current optimization solution at a fixed number of iterations, the recommendation process would be carried out to improve the accuracy of the solution. When the algorithm stagnated, it introduced an adjustment factor to reduce the differences between pheromones of each path to enhance the ant search ability, which could help the algorithm jump out of the local optimal. The experiment result shows that the accuracy of the algorithm is about 3% when facing large-scale problems, which can effectively improve the accuracy and convergence rate of the solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the lack of convergence speed and diversity of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), a dynamic reproductive ant colony algorithm based on piecewise clustering (RCACS) is proposed to optimize the problems. First, the data is segmented by the clustering algorithm, and the exit and entrance of each cluster are obtained by the nearest neighbor strategy. The algorithm traversed all points of the cluster to find an unclosed shortest path according to the exit and entrance. Many fragment paths eventually merge into a full TSP. This strategy can accelerate the convergence speed of the algorithm and help it get higher accuracy. Second, when the algorithm stagnates, the dynamic regeneration mechanism based on feature transfer will transfer the excellent features of the mother-ants to the child-ants, so that it can further explore the neighborhood of the current optimal solution and help the algorithm jump out of the local optimum. From the results of simulation experiments and the rank-sum test, it can be found that the improved algorithm can effectively improve the diversity and accuracy of the algorithm, especially when solving large-scale problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a typical combinatorial optimization problem, which is often applied to sensor placement, path planning, etc. In this paper, an improved ACO algorithm based on an adaptive heuristic factor (AHACO) is proposed to deal with the TSP. In the AHACO, three main improvements are proposed to improve the performance of the algorithm. First, the k-means algorithm is introduced to classify cities. The AHACO provides different movement strategies for different city classes, which improves the diversity of the population and improves the search ability of the algorithm. A modified 2-opt local optimizer is proposed to further tune the solution. Finally, a mechanism to jump out of the local optimum is introduced to avoid the stagnation of the algorithm. The proposed algorithm is tested in numerical experiments using 39 TSP instances, and results shows that the solution quality of the AHACO is 83.33% higher than that of the comparison algorithms on average. For large-scale TSP instances, the algorithm is also far better than the comparison algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban heat effect brings with a series of challenges for urban ecology and population health. In order to mitigate the adverse impacts of the urban heat effect quantitatively and effectively, a new land use search and exchange strategy is proposed to improve the multi-type ant colony algorithm in this paper and applied to a case study of Kunming, China. The results reveal the following: (1) the optimization algorithm can quickly locate the high-temperature area of the city and optimize the land use composition of this area; (2) the mean surface temperature of the core area can be reduced by 0.43–0.85 °C after land use optimization; and (3) Compared with Pareto optimization strategy and particle swarm optimization algorithm, the method proposed in this paper can achieve better optimization effect, higher computing efficiency and stability. This method can provide an effective scientific basis for sustainable urban planning and design, urban ecology and livability, and other urban retrofits. • The improved MACO algorithm can obtain high similiarity in fewer iterations. • The improved MACO algorithm can quickly locate the high-temperature area. • The improved MACO algorithm outperforms the Pareto strategy and PSO algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of solving the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), both Ant Colony Optimization and simulated annealing exhibit different limitations depending on the dataset. This article aims to address these limitations by improving and combining these two algorithms using the clustering method. The problems tackled include Ant Colony Optimization's susceptibility to stagnation, slow convergence, excessive computations, and local optima, as well as simulated annealing's slow convergence and limited local search capability. By conducting tests on various TSPLIB datasets, the algorithm proposed in this article demonstrates improved convergence speed and solution quality compared to traditional algorithms. Furthermore, it exhibits certain advantages over other existing improved algorithms. Finally, this article applies this algorithm to logistics transportation, yielding excellent results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the fourth fundamental circuit element, the memristor may execute computations while storing data. Fracmemristor takes advantage of the fractional calculate's long-term memory, non-locality, weak singularity, and the memristor's storage–computational integration. Since the physical structure of the fracmemristor is similar to the topology of the ant transfer probability flow in ACO, we propose the fractional-order memristive ant colony algorithm (FMAC), which uses the fracmemristor physical system to record the probabilistic transfer information of the nodes that the ant will crawl through in the future and pass it to the current node of the ant, so that the ant acquires the ability to predict the future transfer. After instigating the optimization capabilities with TSP, we discovered that FMAC is superior to PACO-3opt, the best integer-order ant colony algorithm currently available. FMAC operates substantially more quickly than the fractional-order memristor ant colony algorithm due to the transfer probability prediction module based on the physical fracmemristor system (FACA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quality of economic development is not sufficient, despite the apparent role that public environmental monitoring and management play in the economy's rapid expansion. Therefore, enhancing the standard of economic growth is of the utmost importance. It is vital to establish innovative management techniques to support social and governmental transformation in order to raise the standard of economic development. Economic development affects public administration's fundamental duties and goals. The division of public administration distributes social resources and enhances the market's function. The fundamental problem in public economic management is how to successfully actualize rational resource allocation, advance social justice, and boost social welfare on the basis of resource scarcity and the breakdown of the market mechanism. This study greatly increases the global optimization performance of the fundamental ant colony method and provides the explicit programme and simulation stages for the new algorithm. Finally, simulation tests are conducted using the basic ant colony algorithm and the upgraded ant colony algorithm in relation to the decision-making model of public economic management. According to the simulation findings, the revised algorithm successfully addresses the traditional approach's drawbacks, including its slow convergence speed and propensity to easily enter local minima, and its optimization performance has increased by 30.23%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the problems of slow convergence and easy fall into local optimal solution of the classic ant colony algorithm in path planning, an improved ant colony algorithm is proposed. Firstly, the Floyd algorithm is introduced to generate the guiding path, and increase the pheromone content on the guiding path. Through the difference in initial pheromone, the ant colony is guided to quickly find the target node. Secondly, the fallback strategy is applied to reduce the number of ants who die due to falling into the trap to increase the probability of ants finding the target node. Thirdly, the gravity concept in the artificial potential field method and the concept of distance from the optional node to the target node are introduced to improve the heuristic function to make up for the fallback strategy on the convergence speed of the algorithm. Fourthly, a multi-objective optimization function is proposed, which comprehensively considers the three indexes of path length, security, and energy consumption and combines the dynamic optimization idea to optimize the pheromone update method, to avoid the algorithm falling into the local optimal solution and improve the comprehensive quality of the path. Finally, according to the connectivity principle and quadratic B-spline curve optimization method, the path nodes are optimized to shorten the path length effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of material failure phenomena with coupled multiple scales is a need and a challenge. The fundamental difficulty in these problems is due to multiscale bridging material parameters and damage, which ensure that different scales of analysis should be concordant. To address this issue, an inversion algorithm based on ant colony optimization was developed to establish a bridge from macroscale to mesoscale. By using the developed algorithm, mesoscopic parameters including elasticity modulus and damage can be predicted by relying solely on the macroscopic mechanical response, which can be easily obtained from experiments. The developed algorithm can promote the development of multiscale mechanics, which can support an effective method to determine harmonious material parameters and damage in different scales. As a case study, the multiscale bridging inversion results, including elasticity modulus, stress and strain, and damage from macroscale to mesoscale of a concrete specimen, are given and compared with the corresponding experiment. The ability of the developed inversion algorithm is verified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ant colony optimization (ACO) has a good performance in solving discrete problems, but it inevitably has some disadvantages. Although it has good stability, it has some shortcomings in the convergence speed and solution accuracy when dealing with a large amount of data. Therefore, to solve the above problems, we proposed a heterogeneous guided ant colony algorithm based on space explosion and long–short memory. First, the difference between the current optimal path and the globally optimal path is used to search for the solution, which could accelerate the convergence of the algorithm. Second, the space explosion strategy is used to recombine the solution in different directions to avoid the algorithm falling into the local optimum. In this paper, 37 TSP data sets are selected to carry out simulation experiments. From the results and the rank-sum test, it could be concluded that the improved ant colony algorithm improved significantly in terms of convergence speed and solution accuracy. • A heterogeneous guided strategy based on long–short memory is used for dimensionality reduction of data. • A space explosion strategy is proposed to optimize the solution in different directions. • 37 TSP and Wilcoxon rank-sum test have been used for the experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing is the most emerging technology in distributed systems which provides users flexibility of storing data and sharing of computing resources by making use of the concept of virtualization. Large amount of data processing is required in developing cloud application services which increases the bandwidth. To avoid this, proper scheduling of tasks is required. Task scheduling is a combinatorial optimization problem and is one of the critical issues to be solved in cloud computing. Proper task scheduling not only reduces the make span but also hikes the system performance. In this research work, a novel strategy is proposed to solve task scheduling using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) by adapting Reinforcement learning (RL) along with fault tolerance to make the scheduling process fault resistant, and to achieve the objective of minimum make-span. The proposed algorithm, Reinforced-Ant Colony Optimization (RACO) yields about 60% of better performance than sole implementation of ACO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A spectral-line-extraction algorithm based on the ant-colony algorithm is proposed to address the difficulty of extracting spectral lines in low signal-to-noise ratio conditions, and the problem that results from the optimal path algorithm falls into local optimization. The algorithm applies the ant-colony path-optimization strategy to detect a spectral line and constructs a corresponding mathematical model using the grid method. A new cost function is proposed to replace path length as the optimization standard in the conventional ant-colony algorithm. At the same time, the roulette rule is used to determine the direction of the next step. This algorithm improves the traditional heuristic function, increases the attraction of the target spectral line to the route search, and improves the convergence rate. Sea-trial data show that the algorithm performs better in extracting spectral lines with a low signal-to-noise ratio than the optimal path algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]