Artificial ants : from collective intelligence to real-life optimization and beyond

During the last decade, artificial ants have experienced rapid development in the research community, mainly for solving optimization problems. This book provides an overview of the situation ant colony algorithms reached. Artificial Ants encompasses solution methods of hard optimization problems and new trends for collective intelligence. Part 1 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. Part 2 deals with broader issues and provides an overview of current research in the field of artificial ants.