• Energy Research

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is a Swarm Intelligence algorithm that has obtained meta-heuristic researchers' attention and favor over recent years. It comprises good balance between exploitation (employed bee phase and onlooker bee phase) and exploration (scout bee phase). As nowadays, more researchers are using ABC and its variants as a control group to perform comparisons, it is crucial that comparisons with other algorithms are fair. This paper points to some misapprehensions when comparing meta-heuristic algorithms based on iterations (generations or cycles) with special emphasis on ABC. We hope that through our findings this paper can be treated as a beacon to remind researchers to learn from these mistakes.

Swarm intelligence is a research branch that models the population of interacting agents or swarms that are able to self-organize. An ant colony, a flock of birds or an immune system is a typical example of a swarm system. Bees' swarming around their hive is another example of swarm intelligence. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) Algorithm is an optimization algorithm based on the intelligent behaviour of honey bee swarm. In this work, ABC algorithm is used for optimizing multivariable functions and the results produced by ABC, Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Algorithm (PSO) and Particle Swarm Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm (PS-EA) have been compared. The results showed that ABC outperforms the other algorithms.

Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is an optimization algorithm based on a particular intelligent behaviour of honeybee swarms. This work compares the performance of ABC algorithm with that of differential evolution (DE), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and evolutionary algorithm (EA) for multi-dimensional numeric problems. The simulation results show that the performance of ABC algorithm is comparable to those of the mentioned algorithms and can be efficiently employed to solve engineering problems with high dimensionality.

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is one of the most recently introduced swarm-based algorithms. ABC simulates the intelligent foraging behaviour of a honeybee swarm. In this work, ABC is used for optimizing a large set of numerical test functions and the results produced by ABC algorithm are compared with the results obtained by genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization algorithm, differential evolution algorithm and evolution strategies. Results show that the performance of the ABC is better than or similar to those of other population-based algorithms with the advantage of employing fewer control parameters.

Swarm intelligence (SI) is briefly defined as the collective behaviour of decentralized and self-organized swarms. The well known examples for these swarms are bird flocks, fish schools and the colony of social insects such as termites, ants and bees. In 1990s, especially two approaches based on ant colony and on fish schooling/bird flocking introduced have highly attracted the interest of researchers. Although the self-organization features are required by SI are strongly and clearly seen in honey bee colonies, unfortunately the researchers have recently started to be interested in the behaviour of these swarm systems to describe new intelligent approaches, especially from the beginning of 2000s. During a decade, several algorithms have been developed depending on different intelligent behaviours of honey bee swarms. Among those, artificial bee colony (ABC) is the one which has been most widely studied on and applied to solve the real world problems, so far. Day by day the number of researchers being interested in ABC algorithm increases rapidly. This work presents a comprehensive survey of the advances with ABC and its applications. It is hoped that this survey would be very beneficial for the researchers studying on SI, particularly ABC algorithm.