Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

The artificial bee colony algorithm is a population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm that models how a honey bee colony forages for food sources. It divides its population into three roles, employed bees that each exploit one known food source and share information about it through a waggle-dance style communication step, onlooker bees that choose which advertised food source to exploit based on how good the reported sources are, and scout bees that abandon a source once it has stopped improving and go searching for a new one at random; in the algorithm each food source stands for a candidate solution and its nectar amount stands for that solution's fitness, so the colony's collective foraging behavior is used to steer the population toward better solutions over successive cycles. Dervis Karaboga of Erciyes University proposed the algorithm in 2005, and it has since been applied to a range of practical optimization problems in computer science and operations research.