Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

To solve the planning problem, we proposed an ACO algorithm with further designed. ACO builds solutions in a step-by-step manner and enables the use of problem-based heuristics to guide the ants to search the way; it is possible to design heuristics are useful to direct the ants to schedule the critical tasks as early as possible and to assign the project tasks to suitable employees with required skills. The Ant Colony Optimization promises to give solution with fast and perform well on the given problem. In consideration of the previous experiments, the proposed approach is compared with four other approaches on three real projects with randomly generated instances.

Ant Colony Optimization algorithm can be described as the repeated execution of the following three main procedures:

1. Solution construction
2. Pheromone management
3. Daemon actions

The solution construction strategy in the proposed algorithm has two steps:

1) Construction of the task list

2) Construction of the matrix for employee allocation. The pheromone values are to be updated by the local and the global updating rules.

6.2 Software Environment

6.2.1 Features of .Net

Microsoft .NET is a set of Microsoft software technologies for rapidly building and integrating XML Web services with Windows-based applications, and Web Application solutions. The .NET Framework is a language-neutral platform for writing programs that can easily and securely interoperate. There’s no language barrier with .NET: there are numerous languages available to the developer including Managed C++, C#, Visual Basic and Java Script. The .NET framework provides the foundation for components seamless interaction locally or remotely on various platforms. Net mainly standardizes the common data types of various languages and communication protocols so that components created in different languages can easily interoperate.

“.NET” is also the collective name given to various software components built upon the .NET platform. The .Net platform will provide to develop both products and services (like .NET My Services, Passport and so on).

6.2.2 The .Net Framework

The .NET Framework has two main parts:

1. The Common Language Runtime (CLR).
2. A hierarchical set of class libraries.

The CLR is the key feature of .net that described as the “execution engine” of .NET. It provides the common execution environment to execute programs which will be implemented in different languages.

The main features .Net is

• Converting a low-level assembly-style language which is called as Intermediate Language (IL), into a native code (0’s and 1’s) to the platform being executed on.
• The new feature garbage collection that manages the memory efficiently.
• Verifying and also enforcing security restrictions on the code when it is running.
• Contains version control feature that maintains different versions of the programs and other such features.

The following some other features of the .NET framework are described:

• Managed Code

The programming language code which targets .NET framework is called managed code. Both managed and unmanaged code can be running at the runtime, but only the managed code contains the information that allows the CLR to make guarantee and execute, for any instance, the safe execution and interoperability.

• Managed Data

Managed Code comes with the Managed Data. Common Language Runtime provides allocation of memory and dealing location facilities, and also garbage collection. Some .NET languages use Managed Data by default; those are like C#, VB .NET and JScript.NET. Targeting Common Language Runtime will be depending on the languages are using; make certain constraints on the available features. With the managed code and unmanaged code, one can have both the managed data and the unmanaged data in .NET application development – the data that doesn’t get garbage collected but instead is looked after by unmanaged code.

• Common Type System

The CLR uses something called the Common Type System (CTS) to strictly enforce type-safety for different languages supported by .Net. This will ensure that all classes which are implementing should be compatible with each other class, describing these types in a common way. Common Type System that defines how types (classes, interfaces, structures…) work at the runtime, which also enables these types in one language that interoperate with the types(classes, interfaces,..) in any other language, including with cross-language exception handling. CTS will ensure that the types are only used in a particular way; the runtime environment also ensures that the code does not make attempt to access any memory that is not allocated to it.

• Common Language Specification

The Common Language Specification provides built-in rules and specifications that support for different languages interoperability. It also ensures that can be developed managed code is fully used by different developers using various programming languages, a set of language features and specifications has been defined in Common Language Specification (CLS). The components which follow these specifications and expose only Common Language Specification features are considered as CLS-compliant code.

6.2.3 The Class Library

.NET provides one more special feature called base class library contains hierarchy of classes that are in built. Base class library defines more than 1000 types of inbuilt classes. Each and every class that defined in special construct called the namespace. The root namespace defined System or System.Object. System namespace contains basic types like Int16, Byte, Double, and String, etc. as well as Object. Objects of any class that derived from the System.Object. All the types have been differentiated into two types, Value types and Reference. Value types can be allocated in the stack memory that can provide more flexibility. Also having features called boxing and unboxing, boxing means of converting value types to reference types and vice versa.

The base class library (BCL) is a library of classes that are pretty comprehensive. BCL providing generic collections, network I/O, Security, threading, and so on, which provides also XML and database connectivity using ADO .Net.

The base class library is subdivided into groups of related namespaces; each namespace provides variety of classes that are related logically.

6.2.4 Languages Supported By .Net

The multi-language capability of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET tool enables the programmers to use their programming skills to develop different types of applications like standalone applications, Web services, and web applications. The .NET framework also supports different versions of languages like Visual Basic, C++, VB.NET, and Managed C++, and so on.

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C# is an object oriented programming language used to develop the various applications like web, windows, web services,…there is no standard library for C# on its own but it has been designed with the help of using the .NET libraries.

Fig. 6.1 Net Framework

C#.NET is also compliant with Common Languages Specification and that supports structured exception handling with System Exception namespace. Common Language Specification is a set of rules that are followed by the Common Language Runtime. CLR is the execution engine provided by the .NET and it performs the execution of the code, makes the development process very easy. The objects or components that created by C# able to use in other CLS-compliant languages. Can be use objects and components created in any other CLS-compliant languages in C#.NET. The CLS ensure that complete interoperability between applications, regardless of the different languages used to design the application.

6.3 Features of SQL-Server

SQL-Server is a Microsoft’s official data base server which will use to maintain large number of tables with relations.

The OLAP Services feature available in SQL Server version 7.0 is now called SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services. The term OLAP Services has been replaced with the term Analysis Services. Analysis Services also includes a new data mining component. The Repository component available in SQL Server version 7.0 is now called Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Meta Data Services. References to the component now use the term Meta Data Services. The term repository is used only in reference to the repository engine within Meta Data Services.

SQL-SERVER database consist of six type of objects. They are,

1. Table
2. Query
3. Form
4. Report
5. Macro