Ant Algorithm for Commercial Fleets

This kind of bio behavior mimicry was experimented with in some yard applications, found to work better for some path variability.

Ant Algorithms Help Fleet Operators Halve Emissions
The Engineer (U.K.)
July 27, 2020

Researchers at Aston University in the U.K. have developed software that imitates how ants share knowledge, in an effort to help cities and towns reduce emissions and achieve clean air targets. The researchers found that ants can keep a record of the best solutions to problems and update their knowledge similarly to how computer algorithms do so. The researchers were able to improve these ant algorithms to reduce the number of decisions they make and apply that knowledge to city-scale fleet-routing problems. Said Aston's Darren Chitty, "Algorithms based on the foraging behavior of ants have long been used to solve vehicle routing problems, but now we have found how to scale these up to city-size fleets operating over several weeks in much less time than before. It means much larger fleet optimization problems can be tackled within reasonable timescales using software a user can put on their laptop."