Using ant colony optimisation to improve the efficiency of small meander line RFID antennas

Increasing the efficiency of meander line antennas is an im-portant real-world problem within radio frequency identi-fication (RFID). Meta-heuristic search algorithms, such as ant colony optimisation, are very efficient at solving prob-lems that require paths to be constructed. This search tech-nique is adapted to solve the grid based path problem for meander line antennas and incorporates the NEC evalua-tion suite. The results for grid sizes up to 10 × 10 grid indicates that ant colony optimisation is extremely effective at this real-world problem.