Advanced Strategy for Droplet Routing in Digital Microfluidic Biochips Using ACO

Abstract

Significant researches are going on for high performance droplet routing in Digital Microfluidic Biochip (DMFB). This chapter elaborates an ant colony optimization based droplet routing technique for high performance design in DMFB. The method is divided into two phases. (1) In the first phase, two dedicated ants generated from each source of the droplets traverse the rectilinear path between the source-target pairs and deposit pheromone to construct rectangular bounding box. Initial bounding box helps in restricted ant movements in the next phase. (2) In the second phase, real routing path is generated. Detour and stalling phenomena are incurred to resolve routing conflict. The method has explored both single ant and multiple ant systems to address detours from the conflicting zone in search for the best possible route towards destination. The method has been simulated on several existing benchmarks and comparative results are quite encouraging.