Self-Adaptive and Adaptive Parameter Control in Improved Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

The Improved Artificial Bee Colony (IABC) algorithm is a variant of the well-known Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. In IABC, a new initialization approach and a new search mechanism were added to the ABC for avoiding local optimums and a better convergence speed. New parameters were added for the new search mechanism. Specified values of these newly added parameters have a direct impact on the performance of the IABC algorithm. For better performance of the algorithm, parameter values should be subjected to change from problem to problem and also need to be updated during the run of the algorithm. In this paper, two novel parameter control methods and related algorithms have been developed in order to increase the performance of the IABC algorithm for large scale optimization problems. One of them is an adaptive parameter control which updates parameter values according to the feedback coming from the search process during the run of the algorithm. In the second method, the management of the parameter values is left to the algorithm itself, which is called self-adaptive parameter control. The adaptive IABC algorithms were examined and compared to other ABC variants and state-of-the-art algorithms on a benchmark functions suite. Through the analysis of the results of the experiments, the adaptive IABC algorithms outperformed almost all ABC variants and gave competitive results with state-of-the-art algorithms from the literature.