Bacterial Foraging Based Algorithm Front-end to Solve Global Optimization Problems

Abstract

The Bacterial Foraging Algorithm (BFOA) is a well-known swarm col-lective intelligence algorithm used to solve a variety of constraint optimization problems with wide success. Despite its universality, implementing the BFOA may be complex due to the calibration of multiple parameters. Moreover, the Two-Swim Modified Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (TS-MBFOA) is a state-of-the-art modification of the BFOA which may lead to solutions close to the optimal but with more parameters than the original BFOA. That is why in this paper we present the design using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and the implementation in the MATLAB platform of a front-end for the TS-MBFOA algorithm to calibrate the algorithm parameters faster and with no need for editing lines of code. To test our proposal, we solve a numerical optimization problem with constraints known as tension/compression spring, where 30 indepen-dent executions were conducted using the TS-MBFOA and then compared with an earlier version called MBFOA. The runtime configuration and the parameter tuning were fluent using our front-end, and the TS-MBFOA obtained the better results. To date, there is no other user-friendly implementation of this specific algorithm in an open-source code, and the front-end is flexible enough to include other numerical optimization problems with minimal effort.