Bacterial colony foraging optimization

This paper proposes a novel bacterial colony foraging (BCF) algorithm for complex optimization problems. The proposed BCF extend original bacterial foraging algorithm to adaptive and cooperative mode by combining bacterial chemotaxis, cell-to-cell communication, and a self-adaptive foraging strategy. The cell-to-cell communication enables the historical search experience sharing among the bacterial colony that can significantly improve convergence. With the self-adaptive strategy, each bacterium can be characterized by focused and deeper exploitation of the promising regions and wider exploration of other regions of the search space. A rigorous performance analysis is given where the proposed algorithm is benchmarked against four state-of-the-art reference algorithms using both a classical and a composition test function suites. The individual and collective bacterial foraging behaviors of the proposed algorithmic model are also studied. Statistical analysis of all these tests highlights the significant performance improvement due to the beneficial combination and shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms the reference algorithms. & 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.