Enhanced compact artificial bee colony

Challenges in many real-world optimization problems arise from limited hardware availability, particularly when the optimization must be performed on a device whose hardware is highly restricted due to cost or space. This paper proposes a new algorithm, namely Enhanced compact Artificial Bee Colony (EcABC) to address this class of optimization problems. The algorithm benefits from the search logic of the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, and similar to other compact algorithms, it does not store the actual population of tentative solutions. Instead, EcABC employs a novel probabilistic representation of the population that is introduced in this paper. The proposed algorithm has been tested on a set of benchmark functions from the CEC2013 benchmark suite, and compared against a number of algorithms including modern compact algorithms, recent population-based ABC variants and some advanced meta-heuristics. Numerical results demonstrate that EcABC significantly outperforms other state of the art compact algorithms. In addition, simulations also indicate that the proposed algorithm shows a comparative performance when compared against its population-based versions. 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.