Abstract
To balance the convergence speed and solution diversity and enhance optimization performance when addressing large-scale optimization problems, this research study presents an improved ant colony optimization (ICMPACO) technique. Its foundations include the co-evolution mechanism, the multi-population strategy, the pheromone diffusion mechanism, and the pheromone updating method. The suggested ICMPACO approach separates the ant population into elite and common categories and breaks the optimization problem into several sub-problems to boost the convergence rate and prevent slipping into the local optimum value. To increase optimization capacity, the pheromone update approach is applied. Ants emit pheromone at a certain spot, and that pheromone progressively spreads to a variety of nearby regions thanks to the pheromone diffusion process. Here, the real gate assignment issue and the travelling salesman problem (TSP) are chosen for the validation of the performance for the optimization of the ICMPACO algorithm. The experiment's findings demonstrate that the suggested ICMPACO method can successfully solve the gate assignment issue, find the optimal optimization value in resolving TSP, provide a better assignment outcome, and exhibit improved optimization ability and stability. The assigned efficiency is comparatively higher than earlier ones. With an assigned efficiency of 83.5 %, it can swiftly arrive at the ideal gate assignment outcome by assigning 132 patients to 20 gates of hospital testing rooms. To minimize the patient's overall hospital processing time, this algorithm was specifically employed with a better level of efficiency to create appropriate scheduling in the hospital.