From Scholarpedia
Dervis Karaboga (2010), Scholarpedia, 5(3):6915.
The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is a swarm based meta-heuristic algorithm that was introduced by Karaboga in 2005 (Karaboga, 2005) for optimizing numerical problems. It was inspired by the intelligent foraging behavior of honey bees. The algorithm is specifically based on the model proposed by Tereshko and Loengarov (2005) for the foraging behaviour of honey bee colonies. The model consists of three essential components: employed and unemployed foraging bees, and food sources. The first two components, employed and unemployed foraging bees, search for rich food sources, which is the third component, close to their hive. The model also defines two leading modes of behaviour which are necessary for self-organizing and collective intelligence: recruitment of foragers to rich food sources resulting in positive feedback and abandonment of poor sources by foragers causing negative feedback.
In ABC, a colony of artificial forager bees (agents) search for rich artificial food sources (good solutions for a given problem). To apply ABC, the considered optimization problem is first converted to the problem of finding the best parameter vector which minimizes an objective function. Then, the artificial bees randomly discover a population of initial solution vectors and then iteratively improve them by employing the strategies: moving towards better solutions by means of a neighbor search mechanism while abandoning poor solutions.
