An Ecology-Based Heterogeneous Approach for Cooperative Search

The concept of optimization is present in several natural processes such as the evolution of species, the behavior of social groups and the ecological relationships of different animal populations. This work uses the concepts of habitats, ecological relationships and ecological successions to build a hybrid cooperative search algorithm, named ECO. The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) and the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms were used in the experiments where benchmark mathematical functions were optimized. Results were compared with ABC and PSO running alone, and with both algorithms in a well known island model with ring topology, all running without the ecology concepts previously mentioned. The ECO algorithm performed better than the other approaches, especially as the dimensionality of the functions increase, possibly thanks to the ecological interactions (intra and inter-habitats) that enabled the co-evolution of populations. Results suggest that the ECO algorithm can be an interesting alternative for numerical optimization.