Cauchy movements for Artificial Bees for finding better food sources

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is one of the most recent swarm intelligence based algorithms which simulates the foraging behavior of honey bee colonies. In the present study we propose a simple modification in the basic structure of ABC to enhance the capabilities of virtual bees in locating the potential food sources (ones having sufficient amount of nectar in them). If the virtual bees are unable to locate a good food source even after a particular number of cycles then they are forced towards another food source with the help of a small perturbation. The corresponding algorithm is named as C-ABC, where C stands for Cauchy distribution which helps the bees in getting away from food sources which are not so good. Analysis of the proposed C-ABC on 5 standard benchmark problems and 7 non-traditional problems, suggested in the special session of CEC´2008, shows that the incorporation of the proposed scheme considerably improves the performance of basic ABC algorithm.