Artificial Bee Colony with Crossover Operations for Discrete Problems

The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is an algorithm designed to solve continuous problems. ABC has been proven to be more effective than other biological-inspired algorithms. However, it is needed to modify its functionality in order to solve a discrete problem. In this work, a natural modification to the original ABC is made to make it able to solve discrete problems. Six neighborhood operators are proposed to simulate the original behavior of ABC. Moreover, several Traveling Salesman Problem Library (TSPLIB) problems were used to examine the proposed method. The results of the proposed method are promising.