Memetic search in artificial bee colony algorithm

Artificial bee colony (ABC) optimization algorithm is relatively a simple and recent population based probabilistic approach for global optimization. ABC has been outperformed over some Nature Inspired Algorithms (NIAs) when tested over benchmark as well as real world optimization problems. The solution search equation of ABC is significantly influenced by a random quantity which helps in exploration at the cost of exploitation of the search space. In the solution search equation of ABC, there is a enough chance to skip the true solution due to large step size. In order to balance between diversity and convergence capability of the ABC, a new local search phase is integrated with the basic ABC to exploit the search space identified by the best individual in the swarm. In the proposed phase, ABC works as a local search algorithm in which, the step size that is required to update the best solution, is controlled by Golden Section Search approach. The proposed strategy is named as Memetic ABC (MeABC). In MeABC, new solutions are generated around the best solution and it helps to enhance the exploitation capability of ABC. MeABC is established as a modified ABC algorithm through experiments over 20 test problems of different complexities and 4 well known engineering optimization problems.