Elite-centered artificial bee colony algorithm with extended solution boundary

Abstract

To improve the performance of Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, we propose a novel approach (named ESOABC-EC&ACS). First, the existence of solutions outside the constrained region (ESO) is designed to explore the possibility of the search helped by these solutions, which facilitates exploring the boundary of the constrained region and obtaining optimal solutions faster. Then, an elite-centered search equation is proposed to balance exploration and exploitation. Finally, adaptive bee colony scaling is constructed to help convergence. Our approach is the combination of these three techniques. The experimental results demonstrate that ESOABC-EC&ACS outperforms other ABC variants and some non-ABC meta-heuristic algorithms on most of the test functions in terms of solution quality. And the proposed heuristic factor for the dynamic weapon target assignment problem can improve the optimization performance. The ESO is the first universal strategy proposed for the survival of solutions outside the constraint region (out-of-bounds) generated when solving various problems directly, which causes extended solution boundary and affects the exploration of the constrained region boundary.