XOR-based artificial bee colony algorithm for binary optimization

The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, which was inspired by the foraging and dance behaviors of real honey bee colonies, was first introduced for solving numerical optimization problems. When the solution space of the optimization problem is binary-structured, the basic ABC algorithm should be modified for solving this class of problems. In this study, we propose XOR-based modification for the solution-updating equation of the ABC algorithm in order to solve binary optimization problems. The proposed method, named binary ABC (binABC), is examined on an uncapacitated facility location problem, which is a pure binary optimization problem, and the results obtained by the binABC are compared with results obtained by binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO), the discrete ABC (DisABC) algorithm, and improved BPSO (IBPSO). The experimental results show that binABC is an alternative tool for solving binary optimization problems and is a competitive algorithm when compared with BPSO, DisABC, and IBPSO in terms of solution quality, robustness, and simplicity.