Title: Using statistical Design of Experiment to decide the effective parameter values for a new hybrid ant colony algorithm

Authors: Phen Chiak See, Kuan Yew Wong

Addresses: Department of Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM Skudai, Malaysia. ' Department of Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM Skudai, Malaysia

Abstract: This paper introduces a newly developed hybrid algorithm for solving Quadratic Assignment Problems (QAPs) and presents the results of a Design of Experiment (DOE) conducted to determine the effective values for all the important parameters used in the algorithm. This hybrid algorithm (called GenANT) is a combination between Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA). Although ACO and GA maintain their original parameters in GenANT, new values for their parameters are required so that each of them can work hand-in-hand to achieve optimal performance in solving QAPs. These parameters are: pheromone persistence factor, ρ; factor of Minimum Pheromone Threshold (MPT) adjustment, θ; interval for MPT adjustment, π; genetic crossover rate. In order to determine their effective values, a fractional factorial DOE was run and the outputs obtained were then analysed. The main advantage of using DOE is its ability to provide values for good parameter setting, based on statistical analysis.

Keywords: design of experiments; DOE; ant colony optimisation; max-min ant systems; genetic algorithms; GAs; MPTS; minimum pheromone threshold strategy; QAPs; quadratic assignment problems; ACO; statistical analysis.

DOI: 10.1504/IJADS.2008.021224

International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences, 2008 Vol.1 No.3, pp.282 - 304

Published online: 13 Nov 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article