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Parallel Ant System for the Set Covering Problem

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Book cover Ant Algorithms (ANTS 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2463))

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Abstract

The Set Covering Problem (SCP) represents an important class of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. Actually, the exact algorithms, such as branch and bound, don’t find optimal solutions within a reasonable amount of time, except for small problems. Recently, the Ant systems (AS) were proposed for solving several combinatorial optimization problems. This paper presents a hybrid approach based on Ant Systems combined with a local search for solving the SCP. To validate the implemented approach, many tests have been realized on known benchmarks, and, an empirical adjustment of its parameters has been realized. To improve the performance of this algorithm, two parallel implementations are proposed.

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Rahoual, M., Hadji, R., Bachelet, V. (2002). Parallel Ant System for the Set Covering Problem. In: Dorigo, M., Di Caro, G., Sampels, M. (eds) Ant Algorithms. ANTS 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2463. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45724-0_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45724-0_25

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44146-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45724-4

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