Artificial bee colony algorithm on distributed environments

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is a metaheuristic approach in which a colony of artificial bees cooperates in finding good solutions for numerical optimization problems. ABC is adopted widely for use in several domains of solution optimization. However, the algorithm generally requires a considerably large computational time and resources. In order to enhance the performance of this algorithm for a large problem size, we introduce a distributed version of ABC. In our parallel algorithm, the entire bee colony is decomposed into several subgroups. Each subgroup then performs a local search concurrently on each processor node. The local best solutions are then exchanged among processor nodes. The algorithm implementation utilizes the message passing technique as a communication paradigm. We then empirically assess the performance based on both result accuracy and algorithm´s efficiency. The experimental results show improvement in both solution quality and computing time when comparing to the sequential ABC algorithm.