Ant colony optimization(ACO) has high optimizing efficiency

but can only be applied to combinational optimization problems. For adapting ACO to continuous optimization problems

the concise evolution mechanism of evolution program(EP) was introduced to reconstruct ACO

in which the objective was to search optimal food source other than the best sequence. The ant colony was divided into global ants and local ants

which guided the individuals to perform global exploratory optimization and local excavating optimization respectively.Ants released pheromone on the individuals

and the pheromone was shared by all ants

which inherited the collective autocatalytic behaviour characterised by positive feedback mechanism of ACO.Under the support of eugenic strategy

the EP-ACO algorithm was constructed. The experimentations on optimization of complex functions showed that EP-ACO could be well fit for solving continuous optimization problems with high global optimization efficiency and showed good adaptability to high dimension problems. Finally

EP-ACO was successfully applied to the operation optimization of the equipment of xylene isomerization.The results were better than the referenced methods.