Artificial bee colony algorithm with gene recombination for numerical function optimization

Abstract

Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is a stochastic and population-based optimization method, which mimics the collaborative foraging behaviour of honey bees and has shown great potential to handle various kinds of optimization problems. However, ABC often suffers from slow convergence speed since its internal mechanism and solution search equation do well in exploration, but badly in exploitation. In order to solve this knotty issue, inspired by the natural phenomenon that the good individuals (solutions) always contain good genes (variables) and the effective combination of the superior genes from different good individuals could more easily produce better offspring, we introduce a novel gene recombination operator (GRO) into ABC to accelerate convergence. To be specific, in GRO, a part of good solutions in the current population are selected to produce candidate solutions by the gene combination. Especially, each good solution recombines with only one other good solution to generate only one candidate solution. In addition, GRO will be launched at the end of each generation. In order to validate its efficiency and effectiveness, GRO is embedded into nine versions of ABC, i.e., the original ABC, GABC, best-so-far ABC(BSFABC), MABC, CABC, ABCVSS, qABC, dABC and distABC, while yields GRABC, GRGABC, GRBSFABC, GRMABC, GRCABC, GRABCVSS, GRqABC, GRdABC and GRdistABC respectively. The experimental results on 22 benchmark functions demonstrate that GRO could enhance the exploitation ability of ABCs and accelerate convergence without loss of diversity.