Building Ant System for Multi-Faceted Test Case Prioritization

This article presents the empirical study of multi-criteria test case prioritization. In this article, a test case prioritization problem with time constraints is being solved by using the ant colony optimization (ACO) approach. The ACO is a meta-heuristic and nature-inspired approach that has been applied for the statement of a coverage-based test case prioritization problem. The proposed approach ranks test cases using statement coverage as a fitness criteria and the execution time as a constraint. The proposed approach is implemented in MatLab and validated on widely used benchmark dataset, freely available on the Software Infrastructure Repository (SIR). The results of experimental study show that the proposed ACO based approach provides near optimal solution to test case prioritization problem.

Automating Aircraft Scanning For Inspection With A UAV And Reinforcement Learning Technique

Visual inspections of aircraft exterior surface are usually required in aircraft maintenance routine. It becomes a trend to use mobile robots equipped with sensors to perform automatic inspections as a replacement of manual inspections which are time-consuming and error-prone. The sensed data such as images and point cloud can be used for further defect characterization leveraging the power of machine learning and data science. In such a robotic inspection procedure, a precise digital model of the aircraft is required for planning the inspection path, however, the original CAD model of the aircraft is often inaccessible to aircraft maintenance shops. Thus, sensors such as 3D Laser scanners and RGB-D (Red, Green, Blue, and Depth) cameras are used because of their capability of generating a 3D model of an interested object in an efficient manner. This paper presents a two-stage approach of automating aircraft scanning with a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) equipped with an RGB-D camera for reconstructing a digital replica of the aircraft when its original CAD model is not available. In the first stage, the UAVcamera system follows a predefined path to quickly scan the aircraft and generate a coarse model of the aircraft. Then, a full-coverage scanning path is computed based on the coarse model of the aircraft. In the second stage, the UAV-Camera system follows the computed path to closely scan the aircraft for generating a dense and precise model of the aircraft. We solved the Coverage Path Planning (CPP) problem for the aircraft scanning using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) which is a reinforcement learning technique. We also implemented the Max-Min Ant System (MMAS) strategy, a population-based optimization algorithm, to solve the CPP problem and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Hyper-Heuristic Based on ACO and Local Search for Dynamic Optimization Problems

Hyper-heuristics comprise a set of approaches that are motivated (at least in part) by the objective of intelligently combining heuristic methods to solve hard optimization problems. Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have been proven to deal with Dynamic Optimization Problems (DOPs) properly. Despite the good results obtained by the integration of local search operators with ACO, little has been done to tackle DOPs. In this research, one of the most reliable ACO schemes, the MAX-MIN Ant System (MMAS), has been integrated with advanced and effective local search operators, resulting in an innovative hyper-heuristic. The local search operators are the Lin–Kernighan (LK) and the Unstringing and Stringing (US) heuristics, and they were intelligently chosen to improve the solution obtained by ACO. The proposed method aims to combine the adaptation capabilities of ACO for DOPs and the good performance of the local search operators chosen in an adaptive way and based on their performance, creating in this way a hyper-heuristic. The travelling salesman problem (TSP) was the base problem to generate both symmetric and asymmetric dynamic test cases. Experiments have shown that the MMAS provides good initial solutions to the local search operators and the hyper-heuristic creates a robust and effective method for the vast majority of test cases.

A Novel Hybrid Algorithm of Max-Min Ant System with Quadratic Programming to Solve the Unit Commitment Problem

In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid algorithm based on MAX-MIN Ant System version of ant colony optimization coupled with quadratic programming (MMAS-QP). Quadratic programming is used to optimize the Economic Dispatching process and MMAS for planning the switching schedule of a set of production units. The algorithm is implemented in MATLAB software environment for two systems, one is 4 generating units running for 8 hours, and the other is 10 generating units running for 24 hours. The impact of heuristic parameters on the behavior of the algorithm is highlighted through the parameters setting. Results obtained shows improved solution compared to several methods such as Modified Ant Colony Optimization (MACO), particle Swarm Optimization combined with Lagrange Relaxation (PSO-LR), Swarm and Evolutionary Computation (SEC), Particle Swarm Optimization combined with Genetic Algorithm (PSO-GA). The proposed method improves sufficiently the quality of the solution as well as the execution time.

A Hybrid Max–Min Ant System by Levy Flight and Opposition-Based Learning

The max–min ant system (MMAS) is a modified ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. Its convergence speed is effectively improved by setting the upper and lower bounds of the pheromone and updating it in the optimal path. However, MMAS still has drawbacks, such as long search time and local extremums. In this paper, the hybrid max–min ant system (HMMAS) is proposed to deal with the shortcomings of MMAS. Employing Levy flight strategy, HMMAS can dynamically adjust the parameters to increase the diversity of solutions and expand the search range. Besides, HMMAS uses the OBL strategy to generate opposite solutions in the early stage. In this way, the convergence is accelerated. When HMMAS falls into a local extremum, the path reorganization strategy is utilized. With its help, HMMAS can redistribute the pheromone in each path and achieve global optimum. To verify the effectiveness, HMMAS is first compared with the three conventional ACO algorithms of AS, ACS, and MMAS in 20 sets of experiments. The results indicate that the average results of HMMAS in the 19 sets of TSP instances are better than the other three algorithms, and the standard deviation in the 14 sets of calculation instances is the smallest. Then, HMMAS is compared with some state-of-the-art algorithms, and the results show that HMMAS is better than other comparison algorithms, either by the minimum or the average value.

Study of Molecular Docking of Alkaloid Derivative Compounds from Stem Karamunting (Rhodomyrtus tomentosa)Against α-Glucosidase Enzymes

Karamunting plant (Rhodomyrtus tomentosa) is a traditional medicinal plant. The leaves, roots, stems, and fruits of Karamunting have been identified, and their biological activities are antioxidants, antibacterial, antidiabetic, anti-inflammatory, and anticancer that contained alkaloids, tannins, and flavonoids. The types of alkaloids found in karamunting stems are homolycorine, ismine, lycorine, maritidine and tazetine. This study aims to determine the binding score of alkaloid-derived compounds with protein α-glucosidase and determine the protein's active site bound to the ligand. The method used in this research is Protein-Ligand ANT-System (PLANTS). The results showed that the anchoring score of homolycorine was -60.83 kcal/mol, ismine -64.42 kcal/mol, lycorine -71.20 kcal/mol, maritidine -61.82 kcal/mol, and tazetine -65.02 kcal/mol. The active sites used for binding are Glu526, Gly555, and Pro556. The average score for anchoring alkaloid-derived compounds with protein α-glucosidase is 83.84%. This number indicates that karamunting stems can be used as antidiabetic.

A Novel Gaussian Ant Colony Algorithm for Clustering Cell Tracking

Cell behavior analysis is a fundamental process in cell biology to obtain the correlation between many diseases and abnormal cell behavior. Moreover, accurate number estimation plays an important role for the construction of cell lineage trees. In this paper, a novel Gaussian ant colony algorithm, for clustering or spatial overlap cell state and number estimator, simultaneously, is proposed. We have introduced a novel definition of the Gaussian ant system borrowed from the concept of the multi-Bernoulli random finite set (RFS) in the way that it encourages ants searching for cell regions effectively. The existence probability of ant colonies is considered for the number and state estimation of cells. Through experiments on two real cell sequences, it is confirmed that our proposed algorithm could automatically track clustering cells in various scenarios and has enabled superior performance compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.