The assignment of cells to reporting or non-reporting cells is an NP-hard problem having an exponential complexity in the Reporting Cell Location Management (RCLM) system. Frequent location update may result in degradation of quality of service due to interference. Miss on the location of a mobile terminal will necessitate a search operation on the network when a call comes in. The number of reporting cells and which cell must be reporting cell should be determined to balance the registration (location update) and search (paging) operations to minimize the cost of RCLM system. T1is paper compares Max-Min ant system (MMAS), rank-based ant system (RAS) and hybrid method of MMAS and RAS that generally used to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Experimental results demonstrate that hybrid method of MMAS and RAS is an effective and competitive approach in fairly satisfactory results with respect to solution quality and execution time for the optimal design of location management system.