A Modified Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Parameter Estimation of Fractional-Order Nonlinear Systems

In this paper, a modified artificial bee colony (MABC) algorithm is proposed to estimate the unknown fractional-order nonlinear systems. First, the parameter estimation problem can be mathematically transformed into a multi-dimensional continuous function optimization problem, which is solved via the MABC algorithm. The proposed MABC algorithm well combines the original artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) and the Nelder-Mead simplex method (NMS) in a very simple way, which takes full advantage of the exploration ability of the ABC algorithm and the exploitation ability of the NMS. And in the meanwhile, the proposed algorithm improves the speed of convergence. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed MABC algorithm, numerical simulations contain two typical uncertain fractional-order nonlinear systems. The results show that compared with the other population-based algorithm and ABC-variants, the proposed MABC for solving the problem of parameter estimation get the faster convergence speed and higher calculation accuracy.