Artificial bee colony with multiple search strategies and a new updating mechanism.

The imbalance of exploration and exploitation is a weakness in artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. To overcome this deficiency, this paper presents an improved ABC (IABC) by employing multiple search strategies and a novel updating method. Firstly, a concept of marginal group is introduced to construct an exploration search strategy. Then, an exploitation search strategy is designed utilising some excellent solutions. Thirdly, the probabilistic selection strategy is modified on this basis of some elite solutions. In the experiments, 22 benchmark problems were utilised to prove the effectiveness of IABC. Test results indicate that IABC achieves stronger optimisation capabilities than the other five ABCs.