Ant Conversation - An Enhancement of ACO

Ant colony optimization (ACO), introduced in 1996, is a heuristic algorithm for optimizing a given problem with simplistic and distributed agents known as the “ants”. In the current work, using the idea of ant conversation, a simulation program was made to improve the performance of ACO. The problem of finding the shortest trail between two points on a grid was used as a benchmark for gauging how well the ant conversation method improved the performance of ACO. The effect of both the application of the ant conversation method and the number of ants were studied and it was observed that ACO with ant conversation not only finds better solutions, but also finds solutions sooner.