Ant Colonies to Assign Terminals to Concentrators

摘要

The last few years have seen a significant growth in communication networks. This has resulted in a large variety of new optimisation problems, most of them in the field of combinatorial optimisation. We address here the Terminal Assignment problem. The main objective is to minimise the cost links to form a network by connecting a collection of terminals to a collection of concentrators. In this paper we consider artificial Ant Colonies to assign terminals to concentrators. The algorithms use an improvement method to locate the global minimum. An Ant Colony algorithm is a swam-based optimisation algorithm that mimics the natural behaviour of ants. We show that artificial Ant Colonies are able to achieve feasible solutions to Terminal Assignment instances, improving the results obtained by previous approaches.