A Novel Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization Approach to Terminal Assignment Problem

Terminal Assignment (TA) problem is a well-known NP-hard problem in the domain of telecommunication networks. This problem deals with assignment of a given collection of terminals to a given collection of concentrators subject to some constraints. Each terminal is assumed to have a positive weight and each concentrator is assumed to have fixed capacity. TA problem assigns terminals to concentrators in such a way that each terminal is assigned to exactly one concentrator, and the aggregate weight of terminals assigned to any concentrator should not exceed its capacity. The objective of the TA problem is to minimize the weighted sum of distances of terminals from their assigned concentrators and the unbalance in loads on different concentrators as measured by a balance function. We have developed a hybrid ant colony optimization approach for the TA problem. Our approach is a combination of Vogel approximation method, an Ant Colony optimization algorithm, and a local search. Computational results on standard benchmark instances show that our proposed approach has performance comparable with other state-of-the-art metaheuristic approaches.