An intelligent method to discover transition rules for cellular automata using bee colony optimisation

This paper presents a new, intelligent approach to discover transition rules for geographical cellular automata (CA) based on bee colony optimisation (BCO–CA) that can perform complex tasks through the cooperation and interaction of bees. The artificial bee colony miner algorithm is used to discover transition rules. In BCO–CA, a food source position is defined by its upper and lower thresholds for each attribute, and each bee searches the best upper and lower thresholds in each attribute as a zone. A transition rule is organised when the zone in each attribute is connected to another node by the operator ‘And’ and is linked to a cell status value. The transition rules are expressed by the logical structure statement ‘IF-Then’, which is explicit and easy to understand. Bee colony optimisation could better avoid the tendency to be vulnerable to local optimisation through local and global searching in the iterative process, and it does not require the discretisation of attribute values. Finally, The BCO–CA model is employed to simulate urban development in the Xi’an-Xian Yang urban area in China. Preliminary results suggest that this BCO approach is effective in capturing complex relationships between spatial variables and urban dynamics. Experimental results indicate that the BCO–CA model achieves a higher accuracy than the NULL and ACO–CA models, which demonstrates the feasibility and availability of the model in the simulation of complex urban dynamic change.