Population based Ant Colony Optmization on FPGA

Abstract

We propose to modify a type of ant algorithm called Population based Ant Colony Optimization (P-ACO) to allow implementation on an FPGA architecture. Ant algorithms are adapted from the natural behavior of ants and used to find good solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. General layout on the FPGA and algorithmic description are covered. The most notable achievements featured in this paper are a runtime reduction and including the approximation of the heuristic function by a small set of favored decisions which changes over time.