Lévy Flights for Ant Colony Optimization in Continuous Domains

Abstract

In this paper, the authors propose the use of the Levy probability distribution as leading mechanism for solutions differentiation in an efficient and bio-inspired optimization algorithm, ant colony optimization in continuous domains, ACOR. In the classical ACOR, new solutions are constructed starting from one solution, selected from an archive, where Gaussian distribution is used for parameter diversification. In the proposed approach, the Levy probability distributions are properly introduced in the solution construction step, in order to couple the ACOR algorithm with the exploration properties of the Levy distribution.