Ant Colony Optimization for Optimal Control

Reference

J. van Ast, R. Babuška, and B. De Schutter, "Ant Colony Optimization for Optimal Control," Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2008), Hong Kong, pp. 2040-2046, June 2008.

Abstract

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has proven to be a very powerful optimization heuristic for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (COPs). It has been demonstrated to work well when applied to various NP-complete problems, such as the traveling salesman problem. In this paper, an ACO approach to optimal control is proposed. This approach requires that a continuous-time, continuous-state model of the system, together with a finite action set, is formulated as a discrete, non-deterministic automaton. The control problem is then translated into a stochastic COP. This method is applied to the time-optimal swing-up and stabilization of a pendulum.

Downloads

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{vanBaB:08-003,
author={J. van Ast and R. Babu{\v{s}}ka and B. {D}e Schutter},
title={Ant Colony Optimization for Optimal Control},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2008)},
address={Hong Kong},
pages={2040--2046},
month=jun,
year={2008}
}


Go to the publications overview page.

This page is maintained by Bart De Schutter. Last update: February 21, 2026.