A Monogenous MBO Approach to Satisfiability

The marriage in honey–bees optimization (MBO) algorithm was recently proposed and showed good results for combinatorial optimization problems. Contrary to most of the swarm intelligence algorithms (such as Ant Colony Optimization), MBO uses self-organization to mix different heuristics. This paper presents a variation of the MBO algorithm where the colony contains a single queen with multiple workers. The model is used to solve a special class of the propositional satisfiability problems (SAT) known as 3-SAT, where each constraint contains exactly three variables. The objective of this paper is to detail the algorithm and analyze its behavior on 3-SAT using three parameters gleaned from biological concepts: the queen’s spermatheca size, the colony size, and the amount of time devoted for brood-care. The MBO algorithm outperformed well known heuristics for SAT.