Effect of direct communication in ant system

Authors:
Akira Hara;Takumi Ichimura;Tetsuyuki Takahama;Yoshinori Isomichi;Motoki Shigemi
Affiliations:
Faculty of Information Sciences, Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima, Japan;Faculty of Information Sciences, Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima, Japan;Faculty of Information Sciences, Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima, Japan;Faculty of Information Sciences, Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima, Japan;Faculty of Information Sciences, Hiroshima City University, Hiroshima, Japan
Venue:
KES'05 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems - Volume Part I
Year:
2005

Citing 3
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Abstract

In multi-agent systems, communication among agents plays an important role for cooperative behavior. In this paper, we investigate the effect of direct communication in a multi-agent system, Ant System (AS). Ant agents in AS usually perform indirect communication through pheromones. We introduce the mechanism that ants communicate directly with neighboring ants so that each ant's information can be exchanged. As experimental results, the AS with direct communication acquired better solutions than conventional AS. If the ants have excessive range of direct communications, however, the search performance becomes worse. We showed that local communications are effective in order to search solutions while striking a balance between centralization and diversification of the ants' action. For the effective search, it is important to set the range of the direct communication appropriately.