An Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for Microwave Corrugated Filters Design

Abstract

A practical and useful application of the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) method for microwave corrugated filter design is shown. The classical, general purpose ACO method is adapted to deal with the microwave filter design problem. The design strategy used in this paper is an iterative procedure based on the use of an optimization method along with an electromagnetic simulator. The designs of high-pass and band-pass microwave rectangular waveguide filters working in the C-band and X-band, respectively, for communication applications, are shown. The average convergence performance of the ACO method is characterized by means of Monte Carlo simulations and compared with that obtained with the well-known Genetic Algorithm (GA). The overall performance, for the simulations presented herein, of the ACO is found to be better than that of the GA.