Website reorganization using an ant colony system

The growth of the Internet has led to many studies on adaptive websites based on web usage mining. Most studies focus on providing assistance to users rather than optimizing the website structure itself. A recent work pioneered the use of 0-1 programming models to optimally reorganize websites based on the cohesion among web pages obtained by web usage mining. The proposed models reduce the information overload and search depth for users surfing the web. A heuristic approach has also been proposed to reduce the required computation time. However, the heuristic approach involving two successive 0-1 programming models still requires a very long computation time to find the optimal solution, especially when the website contains many hyperlinks. To resolve the efficiency problem, this study proposes an ant colony system to reorganize website structures. The proposed algorithm is tested extensively with numerical examples. Additionally, an empirical study with a real-world website is conducted to verify the algorithm applicability.