Artificial ants : from collective intelligence to real-life optimization and beyond

During the last decade, artificial ants have experienced rapid development in the research community, mainly for solving optimization problems. This book provides an overview of the situation ant colony algorithms reached. Artificial Ants encompasses solution methods of hard optimization problems and new trends for collective intelligence. Part 1 helps to understand the basis of ant colony algorithms, and to discover a panorama of applications in the field of optimization, particularly in the industrial world. Part 2 deals with broader issues and provides an overview of current research in the field of artificial ants.

Introduction / Nicolas Monmarché, Frédéric Guinand and Patrick Siarry -- From real ants to artificial ants / Alain Lenoir and Nicolas Monmarché -- General principles of ant colony combinatorial problem serving / Antoine Dutot ... [et al.] -- General survey of combinatorial problems treated by artificial ants / Antoine Dutot and Yoann Pigné -- Artificial ants for continuous optimization / Patrick Siarry, Johann Dréo and Nicolas Monmarché -- Ant colony optimization for constraint-based configuration / Patrick Albert, Laurent Henocque and Mathias Kleiner -- Ant colonies for the unit commitment problem : from optimization to predictive control / Guillaume Sandou ... [et al.] -- Ant colony optimization for manufacturing aluminum bars / Marc Gravel and Caroline Gagné -- Ant colony optimization for car sequencing / Caroline Gagné and Marc Gravel -- An ant algorithm for measuring and optimizing the capacity of railway infrastructure / Xavier Gandibleux ... [et al.] -- Artificial ants for magnetic resonance image segmentation / Amir Nakib ... [et al.] -- Vertex coloring using ant colonies / Alain Hertz and Nicolas Zufferey -- Training hidden Markov models using the API ant algorithm / Sébastien Aupetit, Nicolas Monmarché and Mohamed Slimane -- Artificial ants for automatic classification / Amira Hamdi ... [et al.] -- Collective and mobile robotics inspired by insects / Paulo Urbano, Nicolas Monmarché and Pierre Gaucher -- Artificial insects : design and achievement of a popular science exhibition aimed to promote collective artificial intelligence and bio-inspired robotics / Nicolas Monmarché ... [et al.] -- Ant colony optimization for routing in mobile networks in an urban environment / Gianni A. Di Caro, Frederick J.A. Ducatelle and Luca M. Gambardella -- Detection of organizations in complex systems using ant colonies / Antoine Dutot and Damien Olivier -- Artificial ants and disability : three examples dealing with the compensation for autonomy losses and games for visually impaired people / Alexis Sepchat ... [et al.] -- Artificial ants for artificial art / Nicolas Monmarché and Romain Clair -- Artificial ants for natural language processing / Frédéric Guinand and Mathieu Lafourcade -- Artificial ants and bioinformatics (protein folding, multiple alignment and sequencing by hybridization) / Stefan Balev, Omar Gaci and Yoann Pigné.