Java Implementation of Ant Colony Optimization heuristic for finding shortest walk in Traveling Salesman Problem.
Ant Colony Optimization is a method that has been suggested since the early nineties but was first formally proposed and put forward in a thesis by Belgian researcher Marco Dorigo and Luca Maria Gambardella in 1992, Ant Colony System: A Cooperative Learning Approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem and followed up by Dorigo, Birattari, and Stutzle’s thesis in 2006, Ant Colony Optimization: Artificial Ants as a Computational Intelligence Technique.
The Traveling Salesman Problem asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?" It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, important in operations research and theoretical computer science.
This ACO implementation is based on tutorials provided at http://www.baeldung.com/java-ant-colony-optimization and http://www.theprojectspot.com/tutorial-post/ant-colony-optimization-for-hackers/10
It is a working solution and also has a GUI form for inputting the parameters.
Future scope includes an interactive GUI visualization of the problem and solution, and extending the algorithm to solve other problems.