On the Resilience of an Ant-based System in Fuzzy Environments. An Empirical Study

Abstract

The current work describes an empirical study conducted in order to investigate the behavior of an optimization method in a fuzzy environment. MAX-MIN Ant System, an efficient implementation of a heuristic method is used for solving an optimization problem derived from the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Several publicly-available symmetric TSP instances and their fuzzy variants are tested in order to extract some general features. The entry data was adapted by introducing a two-dimensional systematic degree of fuzziness, proportional with the number of nodes, the dimension of the instance and also with the distances between nodes, the scale of the instance. The results show that our proposed method can handle the data uncertainty, showing good resilience and adaptability.