Chaotic bee colony algorithms for global numerical optimization

Artificial bee colony (ABC) is the one of the newest nature inspired heuristics for optimization problem. Like the chaos in real bee colony behavior, this paper proposes new ABC algorithms that use chaotic maps for parameter adaptation in order to improve the convergence characteristics and to prevent the ABC to get stuck on local solutions. This has been done by using of chaotic number generators each time a random number is needed by the classical ABC algorithm. Seven new chaotic ABC algorithms have been proposed and different chaotic maps have been analyzed in the benchmark functions. It has been detected that coupling emergent results in different areas, like those of ABC and complex dynamics, can improve the quality of results in some optimization problems. It has been also shown that, the proposed methods have somewhat increased the solution quality, that is in some cases they improved the global searching capability by escaping the local solutions. (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.