Abstract
This paper proposes an improved ant colony system with adaptive strategies, called α
-AACS and considers its performance. First of all, we introduce α-nearness based on the minimum 1-tree for the disadvantage of the Ant Colony System (ACS), which better reflects the chances of a given link, being a member of an optimal tour. Next, we utilize the adaptive operator to balance the population diversity and the convergence speed and propose other optimizations for ACS. Finally, we present an account of the experiments and the statistic-based analysis, which clearly shows that α-AACS has a better global searching ability in finding the best solutions and better performance in solution variation.