Improved Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Continuous Optimization Problems

The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is a swarm-based metaheuristic optimization technique, developed by inspiring foraging and dance behaviors of honey bee colonies. ABC consists of four phases named as initialization, employed bee, onlooker bee and scout bee. The employed bees try to improve their solution in employed bees phase. If an employed bee cannot improve self-solution in a certain time, it becomes a scout bee. This alteration is done in the scout bee phase. The onlooker bee phase is placed where information sharing is done. Although a candidate solution improved by onlookers is chosen among the employed bee population according to fitness values of the employed bees, neighbor of candidate solution is randomly selected. In this paper, we propose a selection mechanism for neighborhood of the candidate solutions in the onlooker bee phase. The proposed selection mechanism was based on information shared by the employed bees. Average fitness value obtained by the employed bees is calculated and those better than the average fitness value are written to memory board. Therefore, the onlooker bees select a neighbor from the memory board. In this paper, the proposed ABC-based method called as iABC were applied to both five numerical benchmark functions and an estimation of energy demand problem. Obtained results for the problems show that iABC is better than the basic ABC in terms of solution quality.