Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Dalian, 13-16 August 2006

AN ADAPTIVE PARAMETER CONTROL STRATEGY FOR ACO ZHI-FENG HAO1, RUI-CHU CAI2, HAN HUANG1 1

College of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, P. R. China 2 College of Mathematical Science, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, P. R. China E-MAIL: [email protected], [email protected],[email protected]

Abstract: Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has been proved to be one of the best performing algorithms for NP-hard problems as TSP. Many strategies for ACO have been studied, but fewer tuning methodologies have been done on ACO's parameters which influence the algorithm directly. The setting of ACO's parameters is considered as a combinational optimization problem in this paper. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is introduced to solve this problem, and an adaptive parameter setting strategy is proposed. It’s proved to be effective by the experiment based on TSPLIB test.

Keywords: Ant Colony Optimization; Particle Swarm Optimization; Adaptive parameters; TSP

1.

Introduction

Ant Colony Optimization was first proposed by M. Dorigo and his colleagues as a multi-agent approach to deal with difficult combinatorial optimization problems such as TSP[1]. Since then, a number of applications to the NP-hard problems have shown the effectiveness of ACO [1]. Up to now, Ant Colony System (ACS)[2] and MAX-MIN Ant System (MMAS)[3] are so successful and classical that their strategies such as pheromone global-local update and Maximum-Minimum of pheromone are widely used in recent research[1]. As for the ACO’s convergence, Gutjahr[4], St ü tzle[5], Fahmy[6], and Fidanova [7, 8] have done a lot of work. At present, the study on the speed of convergence and the parameter selection is a hot topic[4]. In the previous studies, most effort concerns on finding the best strategy for one parameter, such as: M. Dorigo presented a formula for the optimal number of ants based on the value of ρ and q0 [2]; Watanabe and Matsui proposed an adaptive control mechanism of the parameter candidate sets based on the pheromone concentrations[9]. Pilat and White firstly studied the β , ρ , q0 of the ACS as a whole, but their

strategy didn’t improved the result of the algorithm [10]. In this paper, the parameter selection procedure is studied, and a parameter study strategy based on PSO is developed. This strategy can improve the efficiency of the ACS by the experiment based on TSPLIB test. 2.

The adaptive parameter control strategy

There are many parameters in the ACO (include β , ρ , q0 , m ), which makes the parameter setting difficult. In general, the different parameter setting will lead to the different results. So an adaptive parameter control strategy for the ACO is meaningful. The setting of ACO's parameters is considered as a combinational optimization problem. So, the parameters of the algorithm should be studied as an entity. What’s more, the parameters should change with the problem and the stage of the algorithm. Stützle and H. H. Hoos [3] has pointed out that dynamically altering the values of α and β in response to changes in network status would improve the performance of ants. So, the three aim of our strategy is: a). Considering the parameters as a whole; b). changing the parameters with the problem; c). Changing the parameters according to the stage of the algorithm. PSO was introduced to solve the parameter setting problem. The PSO works by searching iteratively in a region that is defined by each particle’s best previous position, the best global position, the particle’s current position, and its previous velocity[11]. The position of the k +1 th iteration can be described as follow:

V k+1i =Vi k +ϕ1 ⋅ rand (Pi k - xik ) +ϕ2 ⋅ rand (P gk - xik ) (1)

X ik +1 = X ik + Vi k+1

(2)

where V i called the velocity for particle i ,represents the distance to be traveled by this particle form its current k+1

position,

1-4244-0060-0/06/$20.00 ©2006 IEEE 203

X ik +1 represent the particle position, Pi k

Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Dalian, 13-16 August 2006

presents the best previous position, P global position and

ϕ1 , ϕ2

k g

presents the best

are two random value

between [0,2] called acceleration coefficients. In the adaptive parameter control strategy, the position

X

k +1 i

presents the parameters ( β i , ρi , q0 i ) of the ant i ,

and the fitness of the position of PSO is evaluated by the solution obtained by the ant using the parameter Now the ACO with adaptive parameter strategy described as follow: Step1: Initialize. In our strategy each ant has its own parameters values, which are initialized randomly in the range of parameters of ACO. While in the original ACO algorithm, the ants use constants. Step 2: Build the tours and update the local pheromone In this step, each ant uses its own value of the parameters to build the tour; the state transformation rule of ant i is given as follows:  [τ (r, s)]⋅[η(r, s)]βi if s ∈ Jk (r)  βi pk (r, s) =  ∑ [τ (r, u)]⋅[η(r, u)] (3) u∈J (r )  k otherwise 0, where pk ( r , s ) is the probability with which the ant i chooses to move from city r to city s in iteration k , τ is the pheromone, η = 1/ d (r , s) is the reciprocal of distance d ( r , s ) , and J k ( r ) is the set of cities, which will be visited by the ant from the city r ,

βi

is the ant

i ’s parameter that control the relative weight of pheromone trail and heuristic value. Local update of the pheromone trail is done by each ant using the value of its ρi parameter, as:

τ (r,s)=(1-ρi ) ⋅τ (r,s)+ρi ⋅τ 0

(4)

Step 3: Do the global update of the pheromone trail

τ (r,s)=(1-ρ best ) ⋅τ (r,s)+ρ best ⋅ where

ρ best

1 Lmin

is global best value of

parameter

previous success with current stage, including the individual best solution Li min and individual best parameters ( β ibest , ρibest , q0ibest ) . And the population of ant checks whether its best solution of current iteration is better than its best previous global best solution. If so, do the above action similarly. b. Use the basic PSO to update the parameters. Let X i presents the parameters ( β i , ρi , q0 i ) of the ant i , the adaptive parameter update using PSO can be described as follow: V k+1i = Vi k + ϕ1 rand (Pi k - xik ) + ϕ2 rand (P gk - xik ) (6) X ik +1 = X ik + Vi k+1

(7)

which is the same as (1) and (2). c. Reinitialize illegal parameter values. According to (7), the value of parameters may be illegal. There are many solutions to this problem, and reinitializing the parameter is the choice in this paper. Those steps are repeated until the end condition is satisfied. 3.

Applying the strategy to ACS

In order to test the efficiency of the proposed strategy, we applied our strategy to the basic ACS, and developed a new ant algorithm called PSOACS. A comparison of the performance between basic ACS and PSOACS is given based on the experiments for some symmetric TSP instances. The result shows the strategy is efficient. The parameters of ACS include: β , ρ , q0 , m and

τ0

(maybe cl

for candidate-set ACS). In our

adaptive parameter control strategy, we only consider the following parameter: β , ρ and q0 , which are not solved successfully so far. In the previous studies, Dorigo and Gambardella presented a formula for the optimal number of ants m based on the value of q0 and ρ [2]. And τ 0 is the initial pheromone level we can’t adaptively control the value during the algorithm. And the range of the parameters is, β ∈ [0…8] ,

(5)

ρ.

Step 4: Adjust adaptively the parameters This step is the core of the adaptive strategy. It can be described as follow: a. Check the better solution. Each ant checks whether it has found better solution than its best previous success. If find, replace the best

ρ ∈ [0.5…1] , q0 ∈ [0.5…1] ,

which is sufficient large

to contain the best value of almost all types of the ACO. We also test other range of the parameters such as β ∈ [0…6] , ρ ∈ [0.8…1] , q0 ∈ [0.8…1] , the experiments show the result of the algorithm is similar, but in order to let the strategy be easily adapted to other

204

Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Dalian, 13-16 August 2006 algorithms, we choose the largest one. We apply this strategy on the basic ACS, There is no local search strategy introduced to the algorithms in the present experiment like ACS-3-opt, and the other parameters are the same as the ACS described in [2]. In the experiment was executed on a PC with an Intel Cerlon (r) IV 1.7GHZ Processor and 256M DDR Memory. The results of experiment on 10 TSP problems are shown in Table 1. It should be noted that every instance is computed 5 times,

Instance eil51 pr76 kroA100 lin105 ts225 pr226 lin318 pcb442 att532 rat783

and the distances between cities are measured by real number. The two algorithms are both programmed in Visual C++6.0 for Windows System. ACS and PSOACS would stop when no better solution could be found in 1000 iterations, which is considered as a virtual convergence of the algorithms. The datasets can be found in TSPLIB: http://www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/iwr/comopt/soft/TSPLIB 95/TSPLIB.html.

Table 1. A Comparison of the results obtained by ACS and PSOACS Algorithm Best Average Worst tavg(s)

tmax(s)

PSOACS

414

417.2

421

4.6

6

ACS

421

424

430

2.6

13

PSOACS

108042

109552

112292

60

87

ACS

108137

109644.2

112292

55

95

PSOACS

21267

21663

22242

39.8

68

ACS

21308

21820.2

22128

55.6

85

PSOACS

14464

14529.8

14659

34

43

ACS

14493

14872.2

15332

37.6

67

PSOACS

127590

128296.2

129959

254

461

ACS

127637

129930.4

133990

246.8

472

PSOACS

80211

81332.8

82214

244.4

410

ACS

80864

83187.8

84742

85.6

227

PSOACS

42503

43005.8

45143

906.2

1940

42629

43415.4

44169

1104.2

1737

PSOACS

52304

52681.2

53667

2240.8

3843

ACS

52259

52838.8

53708

2066

3661

PSOACS

28287

28438

28619.

3524.2

5485

ACS

28448

28638

28864

2327.2

3850

PSOACS

9024

9141.2

9223

4240.2

7320

ACS

9083

9192.4

9321

4320

6114

ACS

As shown in Table 1, there is something like precision and time cost in the result of our experiments different from those in the former research because of the different program tools, systems and computing machines. Another possible reason is that the distances between cities in our experiment are measured by integer. But ACS and PSOACS are running in the same setting, so the result

remains helpful to compare the performance of these two algorithms. From Table 1, it could be seen that the PSOACS performs better than the basic ACS. The average lengths obtained by PSOACS are all shorter than those found by ACS in all the 10 TSP problems, the shortest lengths of PSOACS is all shorter than those of ACS (except the

205

Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Dalian, 13-16 August 2006 pcb442). Therefore, we can conclude that PSOACS is proved to be more effective and steady than ACS. The table also shows that in 6 examples of 10. The PSOACS spends a little more time than the ACS and 4 examples of 10 the ACS needs more time, which shows the time cost of PSOACS is similar with the PSOACS. So the adaptive parameter control strategy is feasible because of its acceptable time cost. 4.

Conclusions

In this paper, an adaptive parameter strategy for the ant colony system is designed. According to this strategy, every ant has its own set of parameters which are initialized randomly. During the algorithm, the parameters are changed adaptively according to PSO. The experiments on the TSPLIB show the strategy improved the performance of ACS. The success of the strategy indicates that the parameters should be considered as a whole and changed with the problem and the stage of the algorithm. Although our work provides an efficient way for parameters setting, the relation between the parameters is no presented. The adaptive strategy is designed in a fuzzy way, and it is uncertain whether it is the best. Further study is suggested to explore a better management for the optimal setting of the parameters according to the three principles of parameter setting proposed in this paper. Acknowledgements This work has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (10471045, 60433020), the program for New Century Excellent Talents in University(NCET), Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (031360, 04020079), Excellent Young Teachers Program of Ministry of Education of China, Fok Ying Tong Education Foundation (91005), Social Science Research Foundation of MOE (2005-241), Key Technology Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province (2005B10101010, 2005B70101118), Key Technology Research and Development Program of Tianhe District (051G041) and Natural Science Foundation

of South China University of Technology (B13-E5050190). References [1] A. Colorni, M. Dorigo and V. Maniezzo. Distributed optimization by ant colonies. Proceeding of 1st European Conference on Artificial Life, France, 1991: 134 – 142 [2] M. Dorigo, L. M. Gambardella. Ant Colony System: A Cooperative Learning Approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. 1997, 1(1): 53-66 [3] T. Stützle, H. H. Hoos. MAX-MIN ant system. Future Generation Computer Systems. 2000, 16(8): 889–914 [4] W. J. Gutjahr. ACO algorithms with guaranteed convergence to the optimal solution. Information Processing Letters. 2002, 82: 145–153 [5] T. Stützle, M. Dorigo. A Short Convergence Proof for a Class of Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. 2002, 6(4): 58-365. [6] A. Badr, A. Fahmy. A proof of convergence for Ant algorithms. Information Sciences. 2004, 160: 267 –279, [7] S. Fidanova. ACO Algorithm with Additional Reinforcement. Third International Workshop, Brussels, Belgium, 2002: 292-293. [8] S. Fidanova, Convergence Proof for a Monte Carlo Method for Combinatorial Optimization Problems. M. Bubak et al. (Eds.): ICCS 2004, LNCS 3039, 2004, 523-530. [9] I., Watanabe, S., Matsui, Improving the Performance of ACO Algorithms by Adaptive Control of Candidate Set, Evolutionary Computation, CEC '03, 2003, 2: 1355 – 1362.. [10] M. L. Pilat, T. White, Using Genetic Algorithms to Optimize ACS-TSP, M.Dorigo et al. (Eds.):ANTS 2002, LNCS 2463, 2002: 282-287. [11] James Kennedy. The Particle Swarm : Social adaptation of Knowledge, IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Indianapolis, 1997: 303 – 308.

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