An extension of ant colony system to continuous optimization problems

A new method for global minimization of continuous functions has been proposed based on Ant Colony Optimization. In contrast with the previous researches on continuous ant-based methods, the proposed scheme is purely pheromone-based. The algorithm has been applied to several standard test functions and the results are compared with those of two other meta-heuristics. The overall results are compatible, in good agreement and in some cases even better than the two other methods. In addition the proposed algorithm is much simpler, which is mainly due to its simpler structure. Also it has fewer control parameters, which makes the parameter settings process easier than many other methods.