1 INTRODUCTION
Several kinds of biological-inspired optimization
algorithms, such as genetic algorithm (GA) inspired by
the Darwinian law of survival of the fittest [1,2], particle
swarm optimization (PSO) inspired by the social
behavior of bird flocking or fish schooling [3,4], ant
colony optimization (ACO) inspired by the foraging
behavior of ant colonies [5], and biogeography-based
optimization (BBO) inspired by the migration behavior
of island species [6], have sprung up over the past
decades. Artificial bee colony (ABC) is such a
computation method proposed in 2005 by Karaboga
who is motivated by the foraging behaviors of honey bee
swarms [7]. In a number of studies, the artificial bee
colony algorithm performed effectively in comparison
to other stochastic optimization methods. It has been
widely used in a variety of applications including
science, engineering, economics and social life thanks
to its simplicity and ease of implementation.
However, some shortcomings of the standard ABC
are also exposed. For example, compared to DE and
PSO, the convergence speed of ABC is especially
slower owing to its candidate producing strategy. In
addition, it’s easy for ABC to get stuck on local when
dealing with complicated multimodal problems. It has
long been a question for a population-based
optimization algorithm to strike a balance between
exploration and exploitation because these two factors
contradict each other. While the standard ABC has a
great ability to explore in the unknown areas of the
solution space, the exploitation ability to utilize the
previous searching results is poor which may lead to
missing of the most promising search direction. The
above two defects limit the wide utilization of ABC
algorithm.
Therefore, great efforts have been made for a better,
modified ABC algorithm. [8] invented interactive ABC
which introduced the concept of universal gravitation
into the consideration of the affection between
employed bees and the onlooker bees. By incorporating
the information of global best (gbest) solution into the
solution search equation to take advantage of the
exploitation, [9] proposed gbest-guided ABC in 2010.
[10] used chaotic maps simulating the chaos in real bee
colony behavior for parameter adaption in population
initialization in order to improve the convergence speed
and prevent the ABC to get stuck on local solutions. [11]
presented another gbest-guided search equation and get
a new search mechanism by means of introducing a
selective probability P and employ chaotic systems as
well as opposition-based learning methods. Another
improvement in the ABC algorithm is controlling the
frequency of perturbation and the ratio of the variance
operator, proposed by [12]. In spite of these
modifications, it still seems to be a thorny problem to
get satisfied results in both aspects.
In this work, an adaptive unified ABC algorithm,
auABC for short, is proposed. Its search solution
equation retains the advantage of the exploration ability
while the global best (gbest) solution is also applied in
order to improve the exploitation. It employs five self-
adaptive parameters, all of which changes with iteration
times. During the prophase of iteration, exploration
work is mainly employed. WWhile during the later
iterative period, exploitation work is the focal point. In
addition, the new modified ABC uses a chaotic strategy
for parameter adaption to take charge of the proportion
of exploration and exploitation.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 gives a summary of ABC algorithm. The
proposed adaptive unified ABC algorithm is presented
and analyzed in section 3. In section 4, the experiments
are carried out and the results are discussed by
comparison. In section 5, conclusions are provided.
An Adaptive Unified Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Global Optimization
Yang Yang
1
, Feiyi Xu
1
, Haidong Hu
2
, Hao Gao
1*
1.
The Institute of Advanced Technology, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China
2.
Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, Beijing, China
E-mail: tsgaohao@gmail.com
Abstract: The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm invented by Karaboga is a relative new nature inspired heuristic for
optimization problem. It has been proved to be competitive with some conventional optimization algorithms. This paper
proposes an adaptive unified artificial bee colony (auABC) algorithm which employs a single equation unifying multiple
strategies into one expression. As we all know, ABC is good at exploration but poor at exploitation due to the
insufficiency in its solution search equation and its one-dimensional search strategy leads to slower convergence speed.
In order to improve the above defects, we created a combined self-adaptive equation that its parameters are determined
by the current iteration times to solve the problem mentioned above. We also introduce a chaotic strategy when
generating candidate food sources which balance the proportion of exploration and exploitation. Experiments conducted
on benchmark functions demonstrate that our algorithm achieves good performance in both unimodal and multimodal
functions as expected compared to several state-of-the-art algorithms.
Key Words: Artificial bee colony algorithm, Solution search equation, Adaptive strategy
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2018 IEEE