Artificial bee colony algorithm merged with pheromone communication mechanism for the 0-1 multidimensional knapsack problem

Abstract

Given a set of n objects, the objective of the 0-1 multidimensional knapsack problem (MKP-01) is to find a subset of the object set that maximizes the total profit of the objects in the subset while satisfying m knapsack constraints. In this paper, we have proposed a new artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm for the MKP-01. The new ABC algorithm introduces a novel communication mechanism among bees, which bases on the updating and diffusion of inductive pheromone produced by bees. In a number of experiments and comparisons, our approach obtains better quality solutions in shorter time than the ABC algorithm without the mechanism. We have also compared the solution performance of our approach against some stochastic approaches recently reported in the literature. Computational results demonstrate the superiority of the new ABC approach over all the other approaches. © 2013 Junzhong Ji et al.