Comparison of Artificial Bee Colony algorithms on engineering problems

Abstract

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is a swarm intelligence based recent optimization technique that mimics from real bee colonies. After the initial proposal of ABC, several variants of original algorithm have been proposed like as other optimization algorithms. Although performances of well-known ABC algorithms are known and comparison works exist on benchmark test functions, the real performance of these algorithms are not known on engineering problems. In this paper, several ABC algorithms are reviewed and compared on three different engineering optimization problems using default parameter settings and tuned parameter settings. Moreover, the best ABC variants obtained from experimental results are compared with contemporary algorithms in literature. The results have shown that ABC algorithms are also competitive with recent state-of-the-art algorithms on engineering problems. © 2016 NSP.