TravellingAnts is an implementation of the Ant Colony metaheuristic optimization algorithm (specifically, Ant System) for solving the travelling salesmen problem.
The repository includes a library for solving arbitrary graphs and also includes a specific example.
The code is intended to be clear and modular. Ants are launched concurrently to improve execution speed. The solver provides call-backs for listening to the running computation rather than hard-coding loggers.
A comparison of the mean cost of each ant's solution per iteration to the overal cumulative best solution as the algorithm progress:
The best solution from the run above:
TravellingAnts is written in Scala. It requires that sbt is installed.
To execute the solver on the example solution and save the solution in the DOT format, execute:
$ sbt --warn run > output.dotIntermediate progress is printed to the standard error device (stderr) and also to a log file (travelling-ants.log) in comma-separated value (CSV) format suitable for analysis.
To produce a visual image of the resulting solution, you can use neato from the grapviz suite of programs:
$ neato -Tpng output.dot > output.png