Hybrid achievement oriented computational chemotaxis in bacterial foraging optimization: a comparative study on numerical benchmark

The social foraging behavior of Escherichia coli bacteria has been recently used for solving complex real-world search and optimization problems. Bacterial foraging optimization algorithm (BFOA) is an important global optimization method inspired from this behavior. In this paper, a novel method called chemotaxis differential evolution optimization algorithm (CDEOA), which augments BFOA with conditional introduction of differential evolution (DE) and Random Search operators, is proposed. Introduction of these operators is done considering the number of successful run and unsuccessful tumble steps of bacteria. CDEOA was compared with the classical BFOA, two variants of BFOA which use DE operators [Adaptive Chemotactic Bacterial Swarm Foraging Optimization with Differential Evolution Strategy (ACBSFO_DES)], chemotaxis differential evolution (CDE), and the classical DE on all 30 numerical functions of the 2014 Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2014) Special Session and Competition on Single Objective Real Parameter Numerical Optimization suite. CDEOA was also compared with four state-of-the-art DE variants that competed in CEC 2014. Statistics of the computer simulations over this benchmark suite indicate that CDEOA outperforms, or is comparable to, its competitors in terms of the quality of final solution and its convergence rates for high-dimensional problems.