INT. J. NEW. INN.

, 2012, 1(1), 191-195

ISSN:2277-4459

AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO MINIMIZE FUNCTIONS

Parul Malik 1, Ridhika Sharma2
2

Aravali College Of Engg. And Managment , Faridabad Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University , Dwarka , New Delhi.

ABSTRACT
This paper presents an evolutionary-based approach to minimize a function. This is termed as a evolutionary approach since, only the ants with better solution are chosen to affect the other ants for the next iteration. The proposed approach employs certain features of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm for minimizing the output of function. Incorporation of ACO as a derivative-free optimization technique in solving MISO problem relieves the computation imposed on the optimized objective functions. The working of this algorithm depends largely on the chosen values of the parameters. The proposed approach has been examined and tested on Shekel function, the trivial function used for testing of minimization problems.

KEYWORDS: Ant Colony Optimization, Non-Combinatorial Problem, MISO functions, evolutionary algorithm, Function Minimization

1. INTRODUCTION
The ant colony algorithms are a probabilistic technique for solving computational problems which can be reduced to finding paths through graphs. Ant algorithms were first proposed by Marco Dorigo and colleagues in 1992[1,2], in his PhD thesis. It is a probabilistic technique that can be used to analyze and solve problems like the traveling salesman problem and the quadratic assignment problem [3], NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. The major applications of ACO are in problems of telecommunication networks (AntNet), vehicle routing, sequential ordering, graph coloring, routing in communications networks. The recent research about ACO has increased its usage for the solution of dynamic, multi-objective, stochastic, continuous and mixedvariable optimization problems and creation of parallel implementations capable of using the new parallel hardware. The availability of high speed computers has increased the possibility of solution of the optimization problems using the new approach of the ACO. These algorithms are based on the actual working in a real ant colony. In the real world, ants wander randomly, and upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails. These trails are based on the quality and quantity of food. If other ants find such a 191

path, they are likely not to keep travelling at random, but to instead follow the trail, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food. Over time, however, the pheromone trail starts to evaporate, thus reducing its attractive strength. The more time it takes for an ant to travel down the path and back again, the more time the pheromones have to evaporate. A short path, hence, gets marched over faster, and thus the pheromone density remains high as it is laid on the path as fast as it can evaporate. Pheromone evaporation has also the advantage of avoiding the convergence to a locally optimal solution. If there were no evaporation at all, the paths chosen by the first ants would tend to be excessively attractive to the following ones. In that case, the exploration of the solution space would not be possible. This functionality of real ant colonies is used in artificial ant colonies in order to solve global optimization searching problems when the closed-form optimization technique cannot be applied. The pheromone model also known as the probabilistic model, is used to generate solutions to the problem under consideration. The pheromone model consists of a set of model parameters that have values, the parameters are called the pheromone trail parameters and the values are called pheromone values. ACO algorithms try to update the pheromone values using previously generated solutions in such a way that the probability to generate high-quality solutions increases over time. The regions of high quality are a International Journal of New Innovations