An improved artificial bee colony algorithm and its application to reliability optimization problems

To further improve the performance of artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC), an improved ABC (IABC) algorithm is proposed for global optimization via employing orthogonal initialization method. Furthermore, to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities, a new search mechanism is also designed. The performance of this algorithm is verified by using 27 benchmark functions. And the comparison analyses are given between the proposed algorithm and other nature-inspired algorithms. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the original ABC algorithm and other algorithms for global optimization problems.