A Hybrid Ant Colony and Grey Wolf Optimization Algorithm for Exploitation-Exploration Balance

The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) are well-known nature-inspired algorithms. ACO is a metaheuristic search algorithm that takes inspiration from the behavior of real ants. In contrast, GWO is a grey wolf population-based heuristic algorithm. The important procedure in optimization is exploration and exploitation. ACO has excellent global and local search capabilities, and the exploration process is performed better than the exploitation process. In the case of regular, GWO is a greatly competitive algorithm compared to other common meta-heuristic algorithms, as it has super performance in the exploitation phase. This study proposed hybrid ACO and GWO algorithms. This hybridization is to acquire the balance between exploitation and exploration in optimization Swarm Intelligence algorithm—comprehensive examination using CEC 2014 benchmark functions. Detail investigations indicate that ACO-GWO could find solutions to unimodal, multi-modal, and hybrid problems in evaluation functions. The results show that the ACO-GWO algorithm outperforms its predecessors in several benchmark function cases. In addition, the proposed ACO-GWO algorithm could achieve an exploitation-exploration balance. Even though ACO-GWO has one disadvantage: since ACO-GWO directly combines two algorithms (ACO and GWO) with two different agents, it has superior demands on computational complexity. © 2024 by the authors.