Title | A Study into Ant Colony Optimization, Evolutionary Computation and Constraint Programming on Binary Constraint Satisfaction Problems |
Publication Type | Conference Paper |
Year of Publication | 2004 |
Authors | van Hemert, JI, Solnon, C |
Conference Name | Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science |
Publisher | Springer-Verlag, Berlin |
Editor | Gottlieb, J, Raidl, G |
ISBN Number | 3-540-21367-8 |
Keywords | ant colony optimisation; constraint programming; constraint satisfaction; evolutionary computation |
Abstract | We compare two heuristic approaches, evolutionary computation and ant colony optimisation, and a complete tree-search approach, constraint programming, for solving binary constraint satisfaction problems. We experimentally show that, if evolutionary computation is far from being able to compete with the two other approaches, ant colony optimisation nearly always succeeds in finding a solution, so that it can actually compete with constraint programming. The resampling ratio is used to provide insight into heuristic algorithms performances. Regarding efficiency, we show that if constraint programming is the fastest when instances have a low number of variables, ant colony optimisation becomes faster when increasing the number of variables. |
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