Simplifying the Bacteria Foraging Optimization Algorithm

The Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm is a swarm intelligence technique which models the individual and group foraging policies of the E. Coli bacteria as a distributed optimization process. The algorithm is structurally complex due to its nested loop architecture and includes several parameters whose selection deeply influences the result. This paper presents some modifications to the original algorithm that simplifies the algorithm structure, and the inclusion of best member information into the search strategy, which improves the performance. The results on several benchmarks show reasonable performance in most tests and a considerable improvement in some complex functions. Also, with the use of the T-Test we were able to confirm that the performance enhancement is statistically significant.