A hybrid artificial bee colony algorithm based on different search mechanisms

Abstract

In order to overcome the drawbacks of standard artificial bee colony ABC algorithm, such as slow convergence and low solution accuracy, a hybrid ABC algorithm based on different search mechanisms is proposed in this paper. According to the type of position information in ABC, three basic search mechanisms are summarised which include searching around the individual, the random neighbour, and the global best solution. Then, the basic search mechanisms are improved to obtain three search strategies. All of these strategies can make a good balance between exploration and exploitation. At every iteration, each bee randomly selects a search strategy to produce a candidate solution under the same probability. The experiment is conducted on 12 classical functions and 28 CEC2013 functions. Results show that the new algorithm performs significantly better than several recently proposed similar algorithms in terms of the convergence speed and solution accuracy.