Randomized Memetic Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm
This is an incremental improvement for optimization algorithm researchers, addressing a specific limitation in memetic algorithms for complex real-world problems.
The authors tackled the problem of balancing exploration and exploitation in the Memetic Artificial Bee Colony algorithm by randomizing its step size, resulting in the Randomized Memetic ABC (RMABC) that outperforms several ABC variants on test problems and an engineering application.
Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) optimization algorithm is one of the recent population based probabilistic approach developed for global optimization. ABC is simple and has been showed significant improvement over other Nature Inspired Algorithms (NIAs) when tested over some standard benchmark functions and for some complex real world optimization problems. Memetic Algorithms also become one of the key methodologies to solve the very large and complex real-world optimization problems. The solution search equation of Memetic ABC is based on Golden Section Search and an arbitrary value which tries to balance exploration and exploitation of search space. But still there are some chances to skip the exact solution due to its step size. In order to balance between diversification and intensification capability of the Memetic ABC, it is randomized the step size in Memetic ABC. The proposed algorithm is named as Randomized Memetic ABC (RMABC). In RMABC, new solutions are generated nearby the best so far solution and it helps to increase the exploitation capability of Memetic ABC. The experiments on some test problems of different complexities and one well known engineering optimization application show that the proposed algorithm outperforms over Memetic ABC (MeABC) and some other variant of ABC algorithm(like Gbest guided ABC (GABC),Hooke Jeeves ABC (HJABC), Best-So-Far ABC (BSFABC) and Modified ABC (MABC) in case of almost all the problems.