Improving Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm Using a Dynamic Reduction Strategy for Dimension Perturbation

To accelerate the convergence speed of Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, this paper proposes a Dynamic Reduction (DR) strategy for dimension perturbation. In the standard ABC, a new solution (food source) is obtained by modifying one dimension of its parent solution. Based on one-dimensional perturbation, both new solutions and their parent solutions have high similarities. This will easily cause slow convergence speed. In our DR strategy, the number of dimension perturbations is assigned a large value at the initial search stage. More dimension perturbations can result in larger differences between offspring and their parent solutions. With the growth of iterations, the number of dimension perturbations dynamically decreases. Less dimension perturbations can reduce the dissimilarities between offspring and their parent solutions. Based on the DR, it can achieve a balance between exploration and exploitation by dynamically changing the number of dimension perturbations. To validate the proposed DR strategy, we embed it into the standard ABC and three well-known ABC variants. Experimental study shows that the proposed DR strategy can efficiently accelerate the convergence and improve the accuracy of solutions.