Enhancing the speed of the Bees Algorithm using pheromone-based recruitment

The bees algorithm is an intelligent optimisation tool mimicking the food foraging behaviour of honey bees. As a powerful search algorithm suitable for both continuous function and combinatorial optimisation it has gone through several modifications since its inception in order to improve its overall performance. This paper presents a new version of the bees algorithm which uses pheromone, a chemical substance secreted by bees and other insects into their environment, enabling them to communicate with other members of their own species. The new bees algorithm employs the pheromone to attract bees to explore the promising regions of the search space. Following a description of the algorithm, the paper presents the results obtained for a number of benchmark problems for functional optimization. Compared to the original bees algorithm, the new version showed an average improvement of 41% in convergence speed.