A hybrid swarm-based algorithm for single-objective optimization problems involving high-cost analyses
This work addresses optimization in technical fields with high-cost analyses, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ABC methods.
The paper tackles single-objective optimization problems with expensive simulations by proposing AsBeC, an enhanced Artificial Bee Colony algorithm, which shows fast convergence, high accuracy, and robust performance on benchmarks, achieving competitive results in international competitions.
In many technical fields, single-objective optimization procedures in continuous domains involve expensive numerical simulations. In this context, an improvement of the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, called the Artificial super-Bee enhanced Colony (AsBeC), is presented. AsBeC is designed to provide fast convergence speed, high solution accuracy and robust performance over a wide range of problems. It implements enhancements of the ABC structure and hybridizations with interpolation strategies. The latter are inspired by the quadratic trust region approach for local investigation and by an efficient global optimizer for separable problems. Each modification and their combined effects are studied with appropriate metrics on a numerical benchmark, which is also used for comparing AsBeC with some effective ABC variants and other derivative-free algorithms. In addition, the presented algorithm is validated on two recent benchmarks adopted for competitions in international conferences. Results show remarkable competitiveness and robustness for AsBeC.