
Ant Colony Optimization (Past, Present and Future)Ant Colony Optimization (Past, Present and Future) 163
7.9 ANTS
The Approximate Nondeterministic Tree Search (ANTS) was proposed in 1999
by (Maniezzo 1998); the name derives from the fact that the proposed
algorithm can be extended in a straightforward way to a branch & bound
procedure (Bertsekas 1995).
ANTS is based on the use of heuristic values derived from domain
knowledge a priori, but computes lower bounds on completing a partial
solution after temporarily adding a node (i,j
1
), and it uses all these lower
bounds of (i,j
1
) to (i,j
n
), with n the number of neighbors, as heuristic values.
The ...