Ant colony methods

Tubular reactor-regenerator system Simultaneous maximization of (1) profit, (2) reactant conversion and (3) selectivity of the desired product. Ant colony method The method is based on the cooperative search behavior of ants. Shelokar et al. (2003)... 

The optimization problem presented above could also be solved using another evolution optimization method, such as genetic algorithm, evaluation strategies or ant colony method. For example, the genetic algorithm was used by Singh... 

Recent methods draw on natural mimicry to find best solutions by using swarms of either pseudo-ants or -bees to test a large number of possible alternatives to find the ones that work well. Ant colony methods are useful in other fields such as delivery route optimization (the traveling salesman problem), but in essence the natural systems are individually trying many options in parallel and reporting back to the other members of the colony about the success or otherwise of their attempts. In the natural world, this is encoded by a pheromone trail and in the computational world it is the upweighting of selection parameters [62,63]. 

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