Integrating the Bees Algorithm with WSAR for Search Direction Determination and Application to Constrained Design Optimisation Problems

The bees algorithm (BA) is a novel swarm-based intelligent metaheuristic search algorithm that was proposed by Pham et al. in 2005. It has been applied to several complex optimisation problems successfully. One of the main mechanisms in BA is to direct search agents (bees) to the search sites that were discovered by the best-performing bees (elite bees). In the original BA, this mechanism is realised by generating random bees in the close neighbourhood of elite bees. In this chapter, a different approach borrowed from the weighted superposition attraction–repulsion algorithm (WSAR) is incorporated into BA for search direction determination. In this approach, attractive and repulsive superpositions are determined by considering “elite bees” and “nonselected site bees” (the worst performing bees), similar to WSAR. The performance of this new approach is tested on four different constrained engineering design optimisation problems. The obtained results are compared with the basic BA and some other metaheuristic algorithms from the literature. The performance of BA can be further improved by utilising such an approach.