An improved artificial bee colony algorithm for optimal land-use allocation

Land-use allocation is of great importance for rapid urban planning and natural resource management. This article presents an improved artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm to solve the spatial optimization problem. The new approach consists of a heuristic information-based pseudorandom initialization (HIPI) method for initial solutions and pseudorandom search strategy based on a long-chain (LC) mechanism for neighborhood searches; together, these methods substantially improve the search efficiency and quality when handling spatial data in large areas. We evaluated the approach via a series of land-use allocation experiments and compared it with particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) methods. The experimental results show that the new approach outperforms the current methods in both computing efficiency and optimization quality.