Intelligent Biogeography-Based Optimization for discrete variables

Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO) is a new bio-inspired and population based optimization algorithm. The convergence of original BBO to the optimum value is slow. Intelligent Biogeography-Based Optimization (IBBO) technique is a hybrid version of BBO with Bacterial Foraging algorithm (BFA). In this paper, authors integrate the bacterial intelligence feature of BFA to decide the valid emigration in migration process of BBO. This increases the ability of BBO to escape from getting trapped in local minima and converges to near-global optimum. This makes faster convergence to the optimum value. To validate the performance of IBBO, experiments have been conducted on unimodal and multimodal benchmark functions of discrete variables. IBBO and BBO are initialized with integer versions of population.