Magnetotactic bacteria optimization algorithm for multimodal optimization

Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) is a kind of polyphyletic group of prokaryotes with the characteristics of magnetotaxis that make them orient and swim along geomagnetic field lines. Magnetotactic bacteria is the optimized product of nature by long process of evolution. A new optimization algorithm called magnetotactic bacteria optimization algorithm (MBOA), which is inspired by the characteristics of magnetotactic bacteria is researched on multimodal problems in the paper. It is compared with classical genetic algorithm and some relatively new optimization algorithms. All of them are tested on 10 standard multimodal functions problems. The experiment results show that the proposed MBOA is effective in optimization problems and has better performance than the other algorithms.