Layers of Consciousness: An Autoethnographic Study of the Comprehensive Exam Process

Abstract

© 2017 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg Artificial bee colony (ABC) is a very effective and efficient swarm-based intelligence optimization algorithm, which simulates the collective foraging behavior of the honey bees. However, ABC has strong exploration ability but poor exploitation ability because its solution search equation performs well in exploration but badly in exploitation. In order to enhance the exploitation ability and obtain a better balance between exploitation and exploration, in this paper, a novel search strategy which exploits the valuable information of the current best solution and a novel probability model which makes full use of the other good solutions on onlooker bee phase are proposed. To be specific, in the novel search strategy, a parameter P is used to control which search equation to be used, the original search equation of ABC or the new proposed search equation. The new proposed search equation utilizes the useful information from the current best solution. In the novel probability model, the selected probability of the good solution is absolutely significantly larger than that of the bad solution, which makes sure the good solutions can attract more onlooker bees to search. We put forward a new ABC variant, named MPGABC by combining the novel search strategy and probability model with the basic framework of ABC. Through the comparison of MPGABC and some other state-of-the-art ABC variants on 22 benchmark functions, 22 CEC2011 real-world optimization problems and 28 CEC2013 real-parameter optimization problems, the experimental results show that MPGABC is better than or at least comparable to the competitors on most of benchmark functions and real-world problems.