An approach based on the use of the ant system to design combinatorial logic circuits

Abstract

In this paper we report the first attempt to design combinational logic circuits using the ant system. In order to design circuits, a measure of quality improvement in partially built circuits is introduced and a cost metric (based on the number of gates) is adopted in order to optimize the feasible circuits generated. The approach is compared to a genetic algorithm and to a human designer using several examples and the sensitivity of the algorithm to its parameters is studied using analysis of variance. The results indicate that the ant system is a viable alternative to design combinational logic circuits.