This paper presents an adaptation of the flying ant colony optimization (FACO) algorithm to solve the traveling salesman problem (TSP). This new modification is called dynamic flying ant colony optimization (DFACO). FACO was originally proposed to solve the quality of service (QoS)-aware web service selection problem. Many researchers have addressed the TSP, but most solutions could not avoid the stagnation problem. In FACO, a flying ant deposits a pheromone by injecting it from a distance; therefore, not only the nodes on the path but also the neighboring nodes receive the pheromone. The amount of pheromone a neighboring node receives is inversely proportional to the distance between it and the node on the path. In this work, we modified the FACO algorithm to make it suitable for TSP in several ways. For example, the number of neighboring nodes that received pheromones varied depending on the quality of the solution compared to the rest of the solutions. This helped to balance the exploration and exploitation strategies. We also embedded the 3-Opt algorithm to improve the solution by mitigating the effect of the stagnation problem. Moreover, the colony contained a combination of regular and flying ants. These modifications aim to help the DFACO algorithm obtain better solutions in less processing time and avoid getting stuck in local minima. This work compared DFACO with (1) ACO and five different methods using 24 TSP datasets and (2) parallel ACO (PACO)-3Opt using 22 TSP datasets. The empirical results showed that DFACO achieved the best results compared with ACO and the five different methods for most of the datasets (23 out of 24) in terms of the quality of the solutions. Further, it achieved better results compared with PACO-3Opt for most of the datasets (20 out of 21) in terms of solution quality and execution time.

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Nowadays, remote sensing technology is being used as an essential tool for monitoring and detecting oil spills to take precautions and to prevent the damages to the marine environment. As an important branch of remote sensing, satellite based synthetic aperture radar imagery (SAR) is the most effective way to accomplish these tasks. Since a marine surface with oil spill seems as a dark object because of much lower backscattered energy, the main problem is to recognize and differentiate the dark objects of oil spills from others to be formed by oceanographic and atmospheric conditions. In this study, Radarsat-1 images covering Lebanese coasts were employed for oil spill detection. For this purpose, a powerful classifier, Artificial Neural Network Multilayer Perceptron (ANN MLP) was used. As the original contribution of the paper, the network was trained by a novel heuristic optimization algorithm known as Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) method besides the conventional Backpropagation (BP) and Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) learning algorithms. A comparison and evaluation of different network training algorithms regarding reliability of detection and robustness show that for this problem best result is achieved with the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm (ABC).

This work augments the Naïve Bayesian learning algorithm with a second training phase in an attempt to improve its classification accuracy. This is achieved by finding more accurate estimations of the needed probability terms. This approach helps in dealing with the problem of the lack of training data. Unlike many previous approaches that deal with this problem, the proposed method is an eager method in the sense that it does most of the work during training and, therefore, it does not increase classification time. It consists of two phases. In the first phase, the algorithm builds a classical Naïve Bayesian classifier. The second phase is a fine tuning phase. In this phase each training instance is classified, if it is misclassified, the probability values involved are fine tuned in such a way that increases the chances of correctly classifying this instance in the next round. Our results show significant improvement in the classification accuracy of many benchmark data sets, compared to the classical Naïve Bayesian, and two other methods that improve on the Naïve Bayesian algorithm.