Ant Colony Optimization

A program designed to find optimal path for e-learning system using ant colony optimization.

Part of coursework for Soft Computing under the guidance of Dr. Shampa Chakraverty

A program designed to find optimal path for e-learning system :
The following are given about the system :
a) Credits of a course
b) Time required to complete a course
c) Difficulty[i][j] representing the difficulty of other course j given learner has completed course i

Objectives

The following objectives needs to be fulfilled :
a) The credits along a path must be maximized.
b) The total difficulty of the path must be minimized.

Constraints

The following are the constraints :
a) Minimum credits that the user wants to acquire
b) The total time limit must not exceed the maximum time limit

Modelling of the problem

The problem is modelled by a graph as follows:
a) The nodes of the graph are course modules. They have 2 properties : credits and time_required
b) The edges of the graph contain the difficulty of going from a course i to a course j
c) Pherome matrix : To store pherome values.
d) pherome_increment_prob : A matrix to store pherome Increments of various ants.

Run on a linux system with min gcc version of 4.2.0

To check if OPENMP is installed, run

echo | cpp -fopenmp -dM | grep -i open

The command should display something like :
#define _OPENMP 201511
201511 means : year 2015, month November(11)

Running Instructions

To specify the number of parallel threads for open mp
export OMP_NUM_THREADS=<omp_num_threads>
Compile the code
g++ -std=c++11 AntColonyOptimization.cpp -fopenmp -o aco
Run the code
./aco <number_of_ants>