Swarm Intelligence Models: Ant Colony Systems Applied to BNF Grammars Rule Derivation

Abstract

Ant Colony Systems have been widely employed in optimization issues primarily focused on path finding optimization, such as Traveling Salesman Problem. The main advantage lies in the choice of the edge to be explored, defined using the idea of pheromone. This article proposes the use of Ant Colony Systems to explore a Backus-Naur form grammar whose elements are solutions to a given problem. Similar studies, without using Ant Colonies, have been used to solve optimization problems, such as Grammatical Swarm (based on Particle Swarm Optimization) and Grammatical Evolution (based on Genetic Algorithms). Proposed algorithm opens the way to a new branch of research in Swarm Intelligence, which until now has been almost non-existent, using ant colony algorithms to solve problems described by a grammar.