Ant Colony Optimization: An Overview

. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a class of constructive metaheuristic algorithms sharing the common approach of constructing a solution on the basis of information provided both by a standard constructive heuristic and by previously constructed solutions. This tutorial is composed of three parts. The rst one frames the ACO approach in current trends of research on metaheuristic algorithms for combinatorial optimization; the second outlines current research within the ACO framework, reporting recent results obtained on dierent problems, while the third part focuses on a particular research line, the ANTS metaheuristic, providing some details on the algorithm and presenting results recently obtained on the quadratic and on the frequency assignment problems. 1. Introduction Complex societal systems pose a lot of problems of combinatorial nature. Trucks have to be routed, depots or sale points have to be located, communication networks have to be designed, containers have to be lled..