A Novel Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Function Optimization

It is known that both exploration and exploitation are important in the search equations of ABC algorithms. How to well balance the two abilities in the search process is still a challenging problem in ABC algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel artificial bee algorithm named as “NABC,” by incorporating the information of the global best solution into the solution search equation of the onlookers stage to improve the exploitation. At the same time, we improve the search equation of the employed bees to keep the exploration. The experimental results of NABC tested on a set of 11 numerical benchmark functions show good performance and fast convergence in solving function optimization problems, compared with variant ABC, DE, and PSO algorithms. The application of NABC on solving five standard knapsack problems shows its effectiveness and practicability.