An Improved Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm With Fitness-Based Information

Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is widely known for its distinguished exploration ability. However, its exploitation ability is relatively poor. To solve the problem, we propose a novel combinatorial search strategy, whose guided vector can be freely switched between a random vector and the global best vector. It can help improve the exploitation ability of ABC. At the same time, a random vector is beneficial to regulate the enhanced exploitation ability. In addition, both of them can pass information on to a current vector instead of only perturbing a current vector itself. The two guided vectors are chosen with a probability depending on the ratio of fitness information of a current vector to that of the global-best vector. Thus, one of the two guided vectors can be adaptively selected to direct the search. In addition, a mechanism of frequency of perturbation is employed to enhance the scale of information sharing between a current vector and a guided vector for each onlooker bee. Moreover, a modified greedy selection mechanism is designed to choose a child vector inspired by simulated annealing. Furthermore, the search strategy of multiple scouts is also employed in the last stage. Based on all these modifications, an improved ABC (IABC) is proposed. Finally, a few experiments are carried on 58 benchmark problems, including CEC2014 benchmark problems. The computational results exhibit the merit of IABC.