Improvements on the Ant-System: Introducing the MAX-MIN Ant System

In this paper we present MAX-MIN Ant System (MMAS) that improves on the Ant system. MMAS is a general purpose heuristic algorithm based on a cooperative search paradigm that is applicable to the solution of combinatorial optimization problems. In the experiments we apply MMAS to symmetric and asymmetric travelling salesman problems. We describe in detail the improvements on Ant system, discuss the addition of local search to MMAS, and report on our computational results, showing that our system also improves over other variations of Ant system.