Artificial ants take their inspiration from observations in nature: animal societies, such as ant colonies, have developed collective behaviors with fascinating efficiency and robustness. The motivation to imitate nature has grown increasingly, and throughout the last decade, artificial ants have experienced rapid development in the research community, mainly for solving optimization problems. Now these algorithms have proved their efficiency and are widely used in the industrial world. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the current situation of ant colony algorithms. The first part helps to understand the basis of ant colony algorithms, and to discover a panorama of applications in the field of optimization, particularly in the industrial world. The second part deals with broader issues, i.e. those not limited to optimization, and provides an overview of current research in the field of artificial ants.

This book is suitable for practitioners, researchers and graduate students in disciplines such as optimization, heuristics, signal processing.

Written for: Researchers and graduate students in computer science and fields related to optimization or broader issues in swarm intelligence.

Keywords: Hard optimization, Heuristic methods, Swarm intelligence.