Comparison of the speed of the ant algorithm on the processor and graphics card

Abstract

The article compares the speed of ant algorithm implemented on the processor and the graphics card in the assignment problem. It is a fundamental issue optimization-combinatorial operations research. In computer science and operations research, the ant algorithm is a probabilistic technique for solving computational problems which can be reduced to finding good paths through graphs. This algorithm is a member of the ant colony algorithms family, in swarm intelligence methods, and it constitutes some metaheuristic optimizations. The article corncerns the problem of allocating Automation and Robotics students at the Nicolaus Copernicus University to several groups working on the construction of the minisumo robot which should be launched in international competitions in Vienna. The program is written in two languages processor programming in C++ and on the graphics card in C language using OpenCL library. The results indicate the advantage of the graphics card to optimization problems, where there is a possibility of parallelization of computations.