Swarm, Programming Assignment One

Swarm: Programming Assignment One
SI Solutions to the TSP Problem

The purpose of this exercise is to experiment with different swarm intelligence (SI) solutions to the traveling salesperson problem (TSP). To this effect, design and implement software that solves the traveling salesperson problem, using swarm intelligence techniques. In particular, I would like you to experiment with different strategies when it comes to the complexity of the agents, the complexity of the stigmery, and possibly the complexity of the colony of the agents, in the sense that not all agents have the same behavior.

Please work on this project in pairs.

Software Specifications

The input to your software can be simple or non-existent.
The output of your software should contain information on:
- The number of cities in the problem instance.
- The length of the best cycle found.
- An ordered list of the cities along the best path found.
- Anything else you deem useful.
You may implement your software in any programming language you choose.
I will provide some files containing arbitrary generated problem instances of the TSP. In addition to generating your own test-data, I would like you to run your program on the test-data that I provide.

Report Specifications

Write a report in which you show and discuss your experiments.
I imagine the report to contain two to three pages of single-spaced text as well as some charts and tables summarizing your experiments and findings.
For the larger problem instances, I am interested in the computing resources you used (time, and if you have an ingenious data-structure, space)
If you want to compare your results to those found by genetic algorithms, that's good too.

Test data

I modified the software so that the distance is in the interval [1, 100]. I also modified it so that the city IDs start at 0.

The test data is of following format: CityA CityB Distance

Four city problem (fully connected)
Six city problem (fully connected)
Eight city problem (fully connected)
Ten city problem (fully connected)
Twelve city problem (fully connected)
Thirty city problem (fully connected)
Hundred city problem (fully connected)
Three hundred city problem (fully connected)
The Java program to generate test data for the cases listed above, so you do not have to read in the data.
Optimal solutions to some of the problems.

Submission Information

The deadline for this project is Wednesday, January 5th, at 5pm. A progress report, detailing the work you accomplished so far and your current thinking about the design of your software is due Wednesday December 15th at 5pm.