A Novel Optimization Algorithm Inspired by Bacteria Behavior Patterns

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel optimization algorithm inspired by bacteria behavior patterns for foraging. Most bacteria can trace attractant chemical molecules for foraging. This tracing capability of bacteria called chemotaxis might be optimized for foraging because it has been evolved for few millenniums. From this observation, we developed a new optimization algorithm based on the chemotaxis of bacteria in this paper. We first define behavior and decision rules based on the behavior patterns of bacteria and then devise an optimization algorithm with these behavior and decision rules. Generally bacteria have a quorum sensing mechanism that makes it possible to effectively forage, but we leave its implementation as a further work for simplicity. Thereby, we call our algorithm a simple bacteria cooperative optimization (BCO) algorithm. Our simple BCO is tested with four function optimization problems on various' parameters of the algorithm. It was found from experiments that the simple BCO can be a good framework for optimization.