A memory-integrated artificial bee algorithm for heuristic optimisation

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science by ResearchAccording to studies about bee swarms, they use special techniques for foraging and they are always able to find notified food sources with exact coordinates. In order to succeed in food source exploration, the information about food sources is transferred between employed bees and onlooker bees via waggle dance. In this study, bee colony behaviours are imitated for further search in one of the common real world problems. Traditional solution techniques from literature may not obtain sufficient results; therefore other techniques have become essential for food source exploration. In this study, artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is used as a base to fulfil this purpose. When employed and onlooker bees are searching for better food sources, they just memorize the current sources and if they find better one, they erase the all information about the previous best food source. In this case, worker bees may visit same food source repeatedly and this circumstance causes a hill climbing in search. The purpose of this study is exploring how to embed a memory system in ABC algorithm to avoid mentioned repetition. In order to fulfil this intention, a structure of Tabu Search method -Tabu List- is applied to develop a memory system. In this study, we expect that a memory system embedded ABC algorithm provides a further search in feasible area to obtain global optimum or obtain better results in comparison with classic ABC algorithm. Results show that, memory idea needs to be improved to fulfil the purpose of this study. On the other hand, proposed memory idea can be integrated other algorithms or problem types to observe difference

Effects of memory and genetic operators on Artificial Bee Colony algorithm for Single Container Loading problem

The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is widely used to achieve optimum solution in a short time in integer-based optimization problems. However, the complexity of integer-based problems such as Knapsack Problems (KP) requires robust algorithms to avoid excessive solution search time. ABC algorithm that provides both the exploitation and the exploration approach is used as an alternative approach for various KP problems in the literature. However, it is rarely used for the Single Container Loading problem (SCLP) which is an important part of the transportation systems. In this study, the exploitation and exploration aspects of the ABC algorithm are improved by using memory mechanisms and genetic operators to develop three different hybrid ABC algorithms. The developed algorithms and the basic ABC algorithm are applied to a SCLP dataset from the literature to observe the effects of the memory mechanism and the genetic operators separately. Besides, a joint hybrid ABC algorithm using both reinforcement approaches is proposed to solve the SCLP. The results show that the joint hybrid ABC algorithm has emerged as a promising approach to solving SCLP with an average performance, and the genetic operators are more effective than the memory mechanism to develop a hybrid ABC algorithm. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved