Beschreibung:
<jats:p>It is shown that on fairly weak conditions, the current solutions
of a metaheuristic following the ant colony optimization paradigm,
the graph-based ant system, converge with a probability that
can be made arbitrarily close to unity to one element of the
set of optimal solutions. The result generalizes a previous
result by removing the very restrictive condition that both
the optimal solution and its encoding are unique (this
generalization makes the proof distinctly more difficult) and
by allowing a wide class of implementation variants in the first
phase of the algorithm. In this way, the range of application
of the convergence result is considerably extended.</jats:p>