AntColonyTSP

An approximation to the travelling salesperson problem using an ant colony system.

Setup

If you do not have gradle, run ./gradlew on MacOS or Linux, or gradlew.bat on Windows.

To run the AntColonyTSP, run gradle run --args="<arguments>" where the possible arguments are (all arguments contain reasonable defaults which can be omitted, with the only required argument being the file name):

• -f or --file the file name of the travelling salesman problem data file, located in the app directory, and where more data files can be found here
• -e or --evaporation the evaporation factor, which is the factor of how much pheromone gets evaporated each time an evaporation occurs (must be between 0.0 and 1.0)
• -t or --transition the transition control factor, which is how often ants will pick the path with the highest pheromone count versus using a roulette wheel (must be between 0.0 and 1.0)
• -p or --population which is the ant population size (must be 1 or greater)
• -m or --mode which specifies either offline mode or online_delayed mode
• -i or --iterations which specifies the iterations count (must be 1 or greater)
• -a or --alpha which specifies alpha (must be 0.0 or greater)
• -b or --beta which specifies beta (must be 0.0 or greater)
• -s or --starting which specifies the starting pheromone (must be 0.0 or greater)

Thus, if I wanted to run this program, I could run:

gradle run --args="-f cities.txt -e 0.05 -t 0.35 -p 250 -m offline -i 250 -a 0.5 -b 1.0 -s 1.0"

Or, if I wanted to rely on defaults, I could run:

gradle run --args="-f cities.txt"

The TSP data file should have a line for each city, with three space-separated values: the first being the city number, and the second and third being the x and y coordinates.