Time-Based Dance Scheduling for Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm and Its Variants

Abstract

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm inspired by the intelligent source search and consumption characteristics of the real honey bees is one of the most powerful optimization techniques. Although the existing behaviours of the honey bees in standard ABC algorithm are capable of producing optimal or near optimal solutions for the vast majority of the problems, there are still some intelligent characteristics that are not modeled yet such as decision-making mechanism used by employed bees to determine when the dancing will be completed. In this study, a mechanism that adjusts the dancing durations of the employed bees according to the fitness values of the associated food sources is proposed and integrated to the standard ABC algorithm and its well-known variants. Experimental studies on a set of complex continuous numerical problems showed that the newly proposed dance scheduling approach significantly improved the search and consumption characteristics of the artificial bees of the standard ABC algorithm and its some variants. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.