Simplify the Basic Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

We consider the problem of simplifying the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm and study the mechanism that actually contributes to its outstanding performance. Based on the collective behaviors of honey bee colony, ABC algorithm is one of the most effective algorithms solving numeric optimization problem. It simulates the collective behavior of honey bee colony with a set of behavioral rules observed by individuals of the swarm. Most of the previous researches on this topic focus on adding features to the algorithm in order to improve its performance on particular problems. In contrast, the work presented in this paper focus on removing unnecessary behavioral rules from the basic ABC algorithm, and investigate how simple the behavior rules can be without qualitative change of its performance on frequently-used benchmarks.