Improved artificial bee colony algorithm with mutual learning

The recently invented artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is an optimization algorithm based on swarm intelligence that has been used to solve many kinds of numerical function optimization problems. It performs well in most cases, however, there still exists an insufficiency in the ABC algorithm that ignores the fitness of related pairs of individuals in the mechanism of finding a neighboring food source. This paper presents an improved ABC algorithm with mutual learning (MutualABC) that adjusts the produced candidate food source with the higher fitness between two individuals selected by a mutual learning factor. The performance of the improved MutualABC algorithm is tested on a set of benchmark functions and compared with the basic ABC algorithm and some classical versions of improved ABC algorithms. The experimental results show that the MutualABC algorithm with appropriate parameters outperforms other ABC algorithms in most experiments.