A hybrid swarm-based algorithm for single-objective optimization problems involving high-cost analyses

In many technical fields, single-objective optimization procedures in continuous domains involve expensive numerical simulations. In this context, an improvement of the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, called the Artificial super-Bee enhanced Colony (AsBeC), is presented. AsBeC is designed to provide fast convergence speed, high solution accuracy and robust performance over a wide range of problems. It implements enhancements of the ABC structure and hybridizations with interpolation strategies. The latter are inspired by the quadratic trust region approach for local investigation and by an efficient global optimizer for separable problems. Each modification and their combined effects are studied with appropriate metrics on a numerical benchmark, which is also used for comparing AsBeC with some effective ABC variants and other derivative-free algorithms. In addition, the presented algorithm is validated on two recent benchmarks adopted for competitions in international conferences. Results show remarkable competitiveness and robustness for AsBeC.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, Springer Swarm Intelligenc

Hybrid Sine Cosine Algorithm for Solving Engineering Optimization Problems

Engineering design optimization problems are difficult to solve because the objective function is often complex, with a mix of continuous and discrete design variables and various design constraints. Our research presents a novel hybrid algorithm that integrates the benefits of the sine cosine algorithm (SCA) and artificial bee colony (ABC) to address engineering design optimization problems. The SCA is a recently developed metaheuristic algorithm with many advantages, such as good search ability and reasonable execution time, but it may suffer from premature convergence. The enhanced SCA search equation is proposed to avoid this drawback and reach a preferable balance between exploitation and exploration abilities. In the proposed hybrid method, named HSCA, the SCA with improved search strategy and the ABC algorithm with two distinct search equations are run alternately during working on the same population. The ABC with multiple search equations can provide proper diversity in the population so that both algorithms complement each other to create beneficial cooperation from their merger. Certain feasibility rules are incorporated in the HSCA to steer the search towards feasible areas of the search space. The HSCA is applied to fifteen demanding engineering design problems to investigate its performance. The presented experimental results indicate that the developed method performs better than the basic SCA and ABC. The HSCA accomplishes pretty competitive results compared to other recent state-of-the-art methods

Artificial bee colony algorithm with time-varying strategy

Artificial bee colony (ABC) is one of the newest additions to the class of swarm intelligence. ABC algorithm has been shown to be competitive with some other population-based algorithms. However, there is still an insufficiency that ABC is good at exploration but poor at exploitation. To make a proper balance between these two conflictive factors, this paper proposed a novel ABC variant with a time-varying strategy where the ratio between the number of employed bees and the number of onlooker bees varies with time. The linear and nonlinear time-varying strategies can be incorporated into the basic ABC algorithm, yielding ABC-LTVS and ABC-NTVS algorithms, respectively. The effects of the added parameters in the two new ABC algorithms are also studied through solving some representative benchmark functions. The proposed ABC algorithm is a simple and easy modification to the structure of the basic ABC algorithm. Moreover, the proposed approach is general and can be incorporated in other ABC variants. A set of 21 benchmark functions in 30 and 50 dimensions are utilized in the experimental studies. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed time-varying strategy

Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm with Improved Explorations for Numerical Function Optimization

A major problem with Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is its premature convergence to local optima, which originates from lack of explorative search capability of the algorithm. This paper introduces ABC with Improved Explorations (ABC-IX), a novel algorithm that modifies both the selection and perturbation operations of the basic ABC algorithm in an explorative way. Unlike the basic ABC algorithm, ABC-IX employs a probabilistic, explorative selection scheme based on simulated annealing which can accept both better and worse candidate solutions. ABC-IX also maintains a self-adaptive perturbation rate, separately for each candidate solution, to promote more explorations. ABC-IX is tested on a number of benchmark problems for numerical optimization and compared with several recent variants of ABC. Results show that ABC-IX often outperforms the other ABC-variants on most of the problems

Hybrid Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm and Particle Swarm Search for Global Optimization

Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is one of the most recent swarm intelligence based algorithms, which has been shown to be competitive to other population-based algorithms. However, there is still an insufficiency in ABC regarding its solution search equation, which is good at exploration but poor at exploitation. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel artificial bee colony algorithm based on particle swarm search mechanism. In this algorithm, for improving the convergence speed, the initial population is generated by using good point set theory rather than random selection firstly. Secondly, in order to enhance the exploitation ability, the employed bee, onlookers, and scouts utilize the mechanism of PSO to search new candidate solutions. Finally, for further improving the searching ability, the chaotic search operator is adopted in the best solution of the current iteration. Our algorithm is tested on some well-known benchmark functions and compared with other algorithms. Results show that our algorithm has good performance

Digital Filter Design Using Improved Artificial Bee Colony Algorithms

Digital filters are often used in digital signal processing applications. The design objective of a digital filter is to find the optimal set of filter coefficients, which satisfies the desired specifications of magnitude and group delay responses. Evolutionary algorithms are population-based meta-heuristic algorithms inspired by the biological behaviors of species. Compared to gradient-based optimization algorithms such as steepest descent and Newton’s like methods, these bio-inspired algorithms have the advantages of not getting stuck at local optima and being independent of the starting point in the solution space. The limitations of evolutionary algorithms include the presence of control parameters, problem specific tuning procedure, premature convergence and slower convergence rate. The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is a swarm-based search meta-heuristic algorithm inspired by the foraging behaviors of honey bee colonies, with the benefit of a relatively fewer control parameters. In its original form, the ABC algorithm has certain limitations such as low convergence rate, and insufficient balance between exploration and exploitation in the search equations. In this dissertation, an ABC-AMR algorithm is proposed by incorporating an adaptive modification rate (AMR) into the original ABC algorithm to increase convergence rate by adjusting the balance between exploration and exploitation in the search equations through an adaptive determination of the number of parameters to be updated in every iteration. A constrained ABC-AMR algorithm is also developed for solving constrained optimization problems.There are many real-world problems requiring simultaneous optimizations of more than one conflicting objectives. Multiobjective (MO) optimization produces a set of feasible solutions called the Pareto front instead of a single optimum solution. For multiobjective optimization, if a decision maker’s preferences can be incorporated during the optimization process, the search process can be confined to the region of interest instead of searching the entire region. In this dissertation, two algorithms are developed for such incorporation. The first one is a reference-point-based MOABC algorithm in which a decision maker’s preferences are included in the optimization process as the reference point. The second one is a physical-programming-based MOABC algorithm in which physical programming is used for setting the region of interest of a decision maker. In this dissertation, the four developed algorithms are applied to solve digital filter design problems. The ABC-AMR algorithm is used to design Types 3 and 4 linear phase FIR differentiators, and the results are compared to those obtained by the original ABC algorithm, three improved ABC algorithms, and the Parks-McClellan algorithm. The constrained ABC-AMR algorithm is applied to the design of sparse Type 1 linear phase FIR filters of filter orders 60, 70 and 80, and the results are compared to three state-of-the-art design methods. The reference-point-based multiobjective ABC algorithm is used to design of asymmetric lowpass, highpass, bandpass and bandstop FIR filters, and the results are compared to those obtained by the preference-based multiobjective differential evolution algorithm. The physical-programming-based multiobjective ABC algorithm is used to design IIR lowpass, highpass and bandpass filters, and the results are compared to three state-of-the-art design methods. Based on the obtained design results, the four design algorithms are shown to be competitive as compared to the state-of-the-art design methods