Artificial Bee Colony with Mutual Search Strategy and Search Mode Control

The artificial bee colony (ABC) was inspired by bees’ foraging behavior. Bees of the colony will try to find better food source (potential solutions) in solution space. After multiple iterations, the bees in the colony may move closer as a few clusters even are trapped in local optimum. In this paper, the search mode control is proposed; the bees will explore or exploit solution space for finding better solutions. Further, the mutual search strategy is proposed to guide bees move to potential food source. The bees will provide various and useful information to each other for searching potential solutions. In experiments, 10 test functions of CEC 2019 are adopted to test proposed method and compare to related works. The proposed method not only can improve original ABC but also perform better than another ABC variant.