Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has become quite popular in recent
years. In contrast to many successful applications, the theoretical
foundation of this randomized search heuristic is rather weak.
Building up such a theory is demanded to understand how these
heuristics work as well as to ... more >>>

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a kind of randomized search heuristic that has become very popular for solving problems from combinatorial optimization. Solutions for a given problem are constructed by a random walk on a so-called construction graph. This random walk can be influenced by heuristic information about the problem. ... more >>>

The main aim of randomized search heuristics is to produce good approximations of optimal solutions within a small amount of time. In contrast to numerous experimental results, there are only a few theoretical results on this subject.
We consider the approximation ability of randomized search for the class of ... more >>>

The complexity theory for black-box algorithms, introduced by
Droste et al. (2006), describes common limits on the efficiency of
a broad class of randomised search heuristics. There is an
obvious trade-off between the generality of the black-box model
and the strength of the bounds that can be proven in such ... more >>>