Artificial bee colony with enhanced search strategies for food sources

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is a population-based optimizer. It simulates bees’ foraging behavior for finding better food sources (solutions). In order to improve bees’ searching ability, in this paper, the moving behavior of onlooker bees is modified. Also, the population manager is involved to produce potential bees and eliminate redundant bees according to the solution searching status. The bees which are generated by the proposed method can guide other bees toward the potential solution space and easier to find better solutions. In order to test the efficiency of the proposed method and compare it with other ABC variants, eleven test functions of CEC 2005 are adopted. It can be observed from the results, that the proposed method performs better than other works on most test functions.