Tournament Selection Based Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm with Elitist Strategy - Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence - page 385

Tournament Selection Based Artificial Bee
Colony Algorithm with Elitist Strategy *

Meng-Dan Zhang 1,2,3,4 , Zhi-Hui Zhan 1,2,3,4,** , Jing-Jing Li 5 , and Jun Zhang 1,2,3,4

1 Department of Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, China, 510275
2 Key Lab. Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education, China
3 Engineering Research Center of Supercomputing Engineering Software, MOE, China
4 Key Lab. Software Technology, Education Department of Guangdong Province, China
5 School of Computer Science, South China Normal University, China
[e-mail]

Abstract. Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is a novel heuristic algorithm
inspired from the intelligent behavior of honey bee swarm. ABC algorithm has
a good performance on solving optimization problems of multivariable
functions and has been applied in many fields. However, traditional ABC
algorithm chooses solutions on the onlooker stage with roulette wheel selection
(RWS) strategy which has several disadvantages. Firstly, RWS is suitable for
maximization optimization problem. The fitness value has to be converted when
solving minimization optimization problem. This makes RWS difficult to be
generally used in real-world applications. Secondly, RWS has no any parameter
that can control the selection pressure. Therefore, RWS is not easy to adapt to
various optimization problems. This paper proposes a tournament selection
based ABC (TSABC) algorithm to avoid these disadvantages of RWS based
ABC. Moreover, this paper proposes an elitist strategy that can be applied to
traditional ABC, TSABC, and any other ABC variants, so as to avoid the
phenomenon that ABC algorithm may abandon the globally best solution in the
scout stage. We compare the performance of traditional ABC and TSABC on a
set of benchmark functions. The experiment results show that TSABC is more
flexible and can be efficiently adapted to solve various optimization problems
by controlling the selection pressure.

Keywords: Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, roulette wheel selection,
tournament selection, selection strategy, elitist strategy.

1 Introduction

With the development of optimization techniques, many heuristic algorithms play
important roles in solving numeric and combinatorial optimization problems [1]-[3].
* This work was supported in part by the National High-Technology Research and
Development Program (863 Program) of China No.2013AA01A212, in part by the National
Natural Science Fundation of China (NSFC) with No. 61402545, the NSFC Key Program
with No. 61332002, and the NSFC for Distinguished Young Scholars with No. 61125205.
** Corresponding author.