Self-adaptive Artificial Bee Colony with a Candidate Strategy Pool

Abstract

As a newly developed metaheuristic algorithm, the artificial bee colony (ABC) has garnered a lot of interest because of its strong exploration ability and easy implementation. However, its exploitation ability is poor and dramatically deteriorates for high-dimension and/or non-separable functions. To fix this defect, a self-adaptive ABC with a candidate strategy pool (SAABC-CS) is proposed. First, several search strategies with different features are assembled in the strategy pool. The top 10% of the bees make up the elite bee group. Then, we choose an appropriate strategy and implement this strategy for the present population according to the success rate learning information. Finally, we simultaneously implement some improved neighborhood search strategies in the scout bee phase. A total of 22 basic benchmark functions and the CEC2013 set of tests were employed to prove the usefulness of SAABC-CS. The impact of combining the five methods and the self-adaptive mechanism inside the SAABC-CS framework was examined in an experiment with 22 fundamental benchmark problems. In the CEC2013 set of tests, the comparison of SAABC-CS with a number of state-of-the-art algorithms showed that SAABC-CS outperformed these widely-used algorithms. Moreover, despite the increasing dimensions of CEC2013, SAABC-CS was robust and offered a higher solution quality.