Other Applications

The ant algorithm can be applied to a variety of other problems. These include Quadratic Assignment Problems (QAP) and Job-shop Scheduling Problems (JSP).

In QAP, the problem is assigning a set of n resources to a set of m locations, while minimizing the cost of the assignment (a function of the way resources are assigned to the locations). The ant algorithm was found to produce the same quality as other standard approaches.

JSP is a much harder problem to solve. In JSP, a set of M machines and a set of J jobs (consisting of a sequence of activities associated with the machines) must be scheduled so that the jobs are completed in a minimal amount of time. While the solutions found with ant algorithms were not optimal, their application to the problem proves that it can be applied to a variety of different problems successfully.

The ant algorithm has been applied to other problems, such as vehicle routing, graph coloring, and network routing. For a detailed list of ant algorithm applications and the results see Dorigo et al.'s "Ant Algorithms for Discrete Optimization" [Dorigo et al. 1999].