Luca Maria Gambardella

Luca Maria Gambardella (born January 4, 1962) has been co-director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA since 1995. Together with former IDSIA senior researcher Marco Dorigo and others he made substantial contributions to the rapidly growing research field of ant colony optimization, a set of multi-agent methods inspired by the pheromone-based communication of biological ants. His combinations of artificial ants and local search algorithms have become a method of choice for the solution of numerous optimization problems involving some sort of graph, such as the well-known traveling salesman problem. He is also Chief Scientific Officer of the IDSIA spin-off AntOptima, whose commercial applications of 'Ant Colony Optimization' include vehicle routing for large commercial truck fleets, and the management of container flow through the largest Mediterranean container terminal.

Selected scholarly publications

 * Ant Algorithms for Discrete Optimization. M. Dorigo, G. D. Caro, L. M. Gambardella - Artificial Life, 1999


 * MACS-VRPTW: a multiple ant colony system for vehicle routing problems with time windows. L. M. Gambardella, É. Taillard, G. Agazzi - Mcgraw-Hill'S Advanced Topics In Computer Science Series, 1999


 * M. Dorigo & L. M. Gambardella, 1997. "Ant Colony System: A Cooperative Learning Approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem". IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 1 (1): 53–66.


 * Ant colonies for the quadratic assignment problem. L. M. Gambardella, E. D. Taillard, M. Dorigo, The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 1999