Parallelization Strategies for the Ant System

Autor(en)
Bernd Bullnheimer, Gabriele Kotsis, Christine Strauss
Abstrakt

The Ant System is a new meta-heuristic method particularly appropriate to solve hard combinatorial optimization problems. It is a population based, nature inspired approach exploiting positive feedback as well as local information and has been applied successfully to a variety of combinatorial optimization problems. The Ant System consists of a set of cooperating agents (artificial ants) and a set of rules that determine the generation, update and usage of local and global information in order to find good solutions. As the structure of the Ant System highly suggests a parallel implementation of the algorithm, in this paper two parallelization strategies for an Ant System implementation are developed and evaluated: the synchronous parallel algorithm and the partially asynchronous parallel algorithm. Using the Traveling Salesman Problem a discrete event simulation is performed, and both strategies are evaluated on the criteria “speedup”, “efficiency” and “efficacy”. Finally further improvements for an advanced parallel implementation are discussed.

Organisation(en)
Institut für Rechnungswesen, Innovation und Strategie
Seiten
87-100
Anzahl der Seiten
13
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3279-4_6
Publikationsdatum
1997
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
101015 Operations Research, 202005 Computer Architektur, 102029 Praktische Informatik
Link zum Portal
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/66b729fb-4f67-4922-9996-12c407b3206a