The Collective Animal Behavior method

Abstract

In this chapter, a metaheuristic algorithm for global optimization called the Collective Animal Behavior (CAB) is introduced. The algorithm is based on animal groups, such as schools of fish, flocks of birds, swarms of locusts, and herds of wildebeest, that exhibit a variety of behaviors including swarming about a food source, milling around a central location or migrating over large distances in aligned groups. These collective behaviors are often advantageous to groups, allowing them to increase their harvesting efficiency, to follow better migration routes, to improve their aerodynamic and to avoid predation. In the presented algorithm in this chapter, the searcher agents emulate a group of animals which interact to each other based on the biological laws of collective motion. The optimization method presented in this chapter has been compared to other well-known optimization algorithms. The results, experiments and practical examples confirm the high performance of the presented method to find a global optimum of several benchmark functions.