A cooperative learning strategy with multiple search mechanisms for improved artificial bee colony optimization

Artificial bee colony (ABC) optimization is a swarm based stochastic search strategy inspired by the foraging behavior of honeybees. Due to its simplicity and promising optimization capability, the ABC concept has devoted special interest with an increasing number of applications to scientific and engineering optimization problems. As an open research field, many researchers attempted to improve the performance of ABC algorithm through new algorithmic frameworks or by introducing modifications on the basic model. This paper presents an improved version of ABC algorithm based on a cooperative learning strategy with modified search mechanisms incorporated at both employed and onlooker levels. The proposed approach referred to as CLABC (Cooperative learning ABC) is tested on benchmark functions for numerical optimization. The results demonstrate the good performance and convergence of the proposed algorithm over other existing ABC variants.