Ant algorithm and application for problem of facility location

ABSTRACT Ant Algorithm is a heuristics algorithm which is developed from the inspiration of the behaviors of real ant colonies to solve optimization problems. In the exploration of the search space, the evoluation of pheromones which are laid on the ground by ants is used. Facility Layout Problems (FLPs) deal with assigning m facilities to n locations, in such a way that the sum of the material handling costs is minimised. Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) was first formulated in 1957 which can be formulated as FLP when equal area facilities are considered. The limited usage of QAP applications due to its NP-Hard structure, has caused the development of heuristics. Because optimal seeking procedures have been restricted to small sizes of the problem say maximum 15-20 facilities. Because of this, in this study, we presents the ant colony to solve the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) of which local search process is Simulated Annealing. AnnealingAnt Algorithm that is coded by C++ programming language is analysed by using current problems in the literature and is compared with other some heuristics. Keywords: Quadratic Assignment Problem, Ant Algorithm, Simulated Annealing, Metaheuristics xiu