Pheromone-Focused Ant Colony Optimization algorithm for path planning

Abstract: Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a prominent swarm intelligence algorithm extensively applied to path planning. However, traditional ACO methods often exhibit shortcomings, such as blind search behavior and slow convergence within complex environments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Pheromone-Focused Ant Colony Optimization (PFACO) algorithm, which introduces three key strategies to enhance the problem-solving ability of the ant colony. First, the initial pheromone distribution is concentrated in more promising regions based on the Euclidean distances of nodes to the start and end points, balancing the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Second, promising solutions are reinforced during colony iterations to intensify pheromone deposition along high-quality paths, accelerating convergence while maintaining solution diversity. Third, a forward-looking mechanism is implemented to penalize redundant path turns, promoting smoother and more efficient solutions. These strategies collectively produce the focused pheromones to guide the ant colony's search, which enhances the global optimization capabilities of the PFACO algorithm, significantly improving convergence speed and solution quality across diverse optimization problems. The experimental results demonstrate that PFACO consistently outperforms comparative ACO algorithms in terms of convergence speed and solution quality.