Determining the optimum section of tunnels using ant colony optimization (Q460444)

Summary: Ant colony optimization is developed to determine optimum cross sections of tunnel structures. Tunnel structures are expensive infrastructures in terms of material, construction, and maintenance and the application of optimization methods has a great role in minimizing their costs. This paper presents the formulation of objective function and constraints of the problem for the first time, and the ant colony optimization, as a developed metaheuristic approach, has been used to solve the problem. The results and comparisons based on numerical examples show the efficiency of the algorithm.