Abstract
Ant Colony Optimization (abbreviated as ACO after) is an optimization method based on the efficient foraging behavior of ant colonies. The ACO can be regarded as the specialized method for searching the shortest paths. So the method has been applied restrictively to only the impractical problem that has a concept of paths like traveling salesman problem. For such a problem like a TSP, it was concluded that the ACO showed the superiority to Genetic Algorithms in efficiency and accuracy. From such a point of view, in this paper, by studying the efficient behavior of ant colonies the searching method applicable to the road or railway planning or channel planning is proposed. The proposed method is applied to find the optimum three-dimensional road alignment and shows the practicability and validity.
