Optimization based on bacterial colony foraging

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel bacterial colony foraging (BCF) algorithm for complex optimization problems. The proposed BCF extend original bacterial foraging algorithm to adaptive and cooperative mode by combining bacterial chemotaxis, cell-to-cell communication, and a self-adaptive foraging strategy. The cell-to-cell communication enables the historical search experience sharing among the bacterial colony that can significantly improve convergence. With the self-adaptive strategy, each bacterium can be characterized by focused and deeper exploitation of the promising regions and wider exploration of other regions of the search space. In the experiments, the proposed algorithm is benchmarked against four state-of-the-art reference algorithms using a set of classical test functions. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.