BMNABC: Binary Multi-Neighborhood Artificial Bee Colony for High-Dimensional Discrete Optimization Problems

Abstract Many meta-heuristic algorithms have been proposed to solve continuous optimization problems. Hence, researchers have applied various techniques to change these algorithms for discrete search spaces. Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is one of the well-known algorithms for real search spaces. ABC has a good ability in exploration but it is weak in exploitation. Several binary versions of ABC have been proposed so far. Since the methods are based on the standard ABC, they have the disadvantage of ABC. In this article, a new binary ABC called binary multi-neighborhood ABC (BMNABC) has been introduced to enhance the exploration and exploitation abilities in the phases of ABC. BMNABC applies the near and far neighborhood information with a new probability function in the first and second phases. A more conscious search than the standard ABC is done in the third phase for those solutions which have been not improved in the previous phases. The performance of algorithm has been evaluated by low- and high-dimensional functions and the 0-1 multidimensional knapsack problems. The proposed method has been compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. The results showed that BMNABC had a better performance in terms of solution accuracy and convergence speed.