Enhancing the food locations in an artificial bee colony algorithm

Artificial bee colony or ABC is one of the newest additions to the class of population based Nature Inspired Algorithms. In the present study we suggest some modifications in the structure of basic ABC to further improve its performance. The corresponding algorithms proposed in the present study are named Intermediate ABC (I-ABC) and I-ABC greedy. In I-ABC, the potential food sources are generated by using the intermediate positions between the uniformly generated random numbers and random numbers generated by opposition based learning (OBL). I-ABC greedy is a variation of I-ABC, where the search is always forced to move towards the solution vector having the best fitness value in the population. While the use of OBL provides a priori information about the search space, the component of greediness improves the convergence rate. The performance of proposed I-ABC and I-ABC greedy are investigated on a comprehensive set of 13 classical benchmark functions, 25 composite functions included in the special session of CEC 2005 and eleven shifted functions proposed in the special session of CEC 2008, ISDA 2009, CEC 2010 and SOCO 2010. Also, the efficiency of the proposed algorithms is validated on two real life problems; frequency modulation sound parameter estimation and to estimate the software cost model parameters. Numerical results and statistical analysis demonstrates that the proposed algorithms are quite competent in dealing with different types of problems.