Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm Combined with Uniform Design

As artificial bee colony algorithm is sensitive to the initial solutions, and is easy to fall into local optimum and premature convergence, this study presents a novel artificial bee colony algorithm based on uniform design to acquire the better initial solutions. It introduces an initialization method with uniform design to replace random initialization, and selects the better ones of those initial bees generated by the initialization method as the initial bee colony. This study also introduces a crossover operator based on uniform design, which can search evenly the solutions in the small vector space formed by two parents. This can increase searching efficiency and accuracy. The best two of the offsprings generated by the crossover operator based on uniform design are taken as new offsprings, and they are compared with their parents to determine whether to update their patents or not. The crossover operator can ensure that the proposed algorithm searches uniformly the solution space. Experimental results performed on several frequently used test functions demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has more outstanding performance and better global searching ability than standard artificial bee colony algorithm.