USING ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM FOR SOLVING ACTIVITY NETWORK AND FINDING THE CRITICAL PATH

Network analysis provides a practical system for planning and controlling large projects in construction and in many other fields.

Ant colony system is a recent approach used for solving path minimization problems.

This paper presents the use of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) system for solving and calculating CPM and PERT networks.

The proposed method is investigated for a selected case study in construction management. The results show that -compared to conventional methods - ACO can produce a good optimal and suboptimal solution in a very short time.