Ant Colony Optimization and Applications

This book is interesting and full of new ideas. It provokes the curiosity of the readers. The book targets both researchers and practitioners. The students and the researchers will acquire knowledge about ant colony optimization and its possible applications as well as practitioners will find new ideas and solutions of their combinatorial optimization and decision-making problems. Ant colony optimization is between the best method for solving difficult optimization problems arising in real life and industry. It has obtained distinguished results on some applications with very restrictive constraints. The reader will find theoretical aspects of ant method as well as applications on a variety of problems. The following applications could be mentioned: multiple knapsack problem, which is an important economical problem; grid scheduling problem; GPS surveying problem; E. coli cultivation modeling; wireless sensor network positioning; image edges detection; workforce planning.