ABSTRACT
The ant colony optimization algorithm is a new type of a heuristic search algorithm put forward by Italian scholar Dorigo in the 1990s. Numerous studies have found that the ants leave some chemicals called pheromones in the process of searching food on the places where they have been, and the same ant colony of ants can perceive this kind of material and its strength, leaving and perceiving the pheromone material is the way of communication between ants called between information[3]. The more intensity of pheromone trail on the road, the higher probability that the ants will track this path, thus the path pheromone trail will be strengthened. A positive information feedback phenomenon is shown by a large number of ant colony’s behavior, namely the more ants passed the path, the higher probability that the other ants will choose the same path. This indirect communication mechanism helps ants to cooperatively search food in the shortest path. The ant colony algorithm has been widely used to solve the problem of vehicle routes, workshop scheduling problem, quadratic assignment problem and so on. In recent years, the ant colony algorithm has gradually been recognized in the process of agricultural irrigation water distribution. In this paper, we used an improved ant colony algorithm to achieve the optimization of water distribution in canal irrigation aiming at the low level of canal system generalization.
