A Multistrategy Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm Enlightened by Variable Neighborhood Search

Artificial bee colony (ABC) has a good exploration ability against its exploitation ability. For enhancing its comprehensive performance, we proposed a multistrategy artificial bee colony (ABCVNS for short) based on the variable neighborhood search method. First, a search strategy candidate pool composed of two search strategies, i.e., ABC/best/1 and ABC/rand/1, is proposed and employed in the employed bee phase and onlooker bee phase. Second, we present another search strategy candidate pool which consists of the original random search strategy and the opposition-based learning method. Then, it is used to further balance the exploration and exploitation abilities in the scout bee phase. Last but not least, motivated by the scheme of neighborhood change of variable neighborhood search, a simple yet efficient choice mechanism of search strategies is presented. Subsequently, the effectiveness of ABCVNS is carried out on two test suites composed of fifty-eight problems. Furthermore, comparisons among ABCVNS and several famous methods are also carried out. The related experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and the superiority of ABCVNS.