DisABC: A new artificial bee colony algorithm for binary optimization

Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is one of the recently proposed swarm intelligence based algorithms for continuous optimization. Therefore it is not possible to use the original ABC algorithm directly to optimize binary structured problems. In this paper we introduce a new version of ABC, called DisABC, which is particularly designed for binary optimization. DisABC uses a new differential expression, which employs a measure of dissimilarity between binary vectors in place of the vector subtraction operator typically used in the original ABC algorithm. Such an expression helps to maintain the major characteristics of the original one and is respondent to the structure of binary optimization problems, too. Similar to original ABC algorithm, DisABC's differential expression works in continuous space while its consequence is used in a two-phase heuristic to construct a complete solution in binary space. Effectiveness of DisABC algorithm is tested on solving the uncapacitated facility location problem (UFLP). A set of 15 benchmark test problem instances of UFLP are adopted from OR-Library and solved by the proposed algorithm. Results are compared with two other state of the art binary optimization algorithms, i.e., binDE and PSO algorithms, in terms of three quality indices. Comparisons indicate that DisABC performs very well and can be regarded as a promising method for solving wide class of binary optimization problems.