Cooperative Approaches to Bacterial Foraging Optimization

Bacterial Foraging Optimization (BFO) is a novel optimization algorithm based on the foraging behavior of E. coli bacteria. This paper presents a variation on the original BFO algorithm, called Cooperative Bacterial Foraging Optimization (CBFO), which significantly improve the convergence speed, accuracy and robustness of original BFO in solving complex optimization problems. This is achieved by applying two cooperative approaches to the BFO, namely the serial heterogeneous cooperation on the implicit space decomposition level and the serial heterogeneous cooperation on the hybrid space decomposition level. Four widely-used benchmark functions have been implemented to test the proposed algorithm, and the results show remarked improvement in performance over the original BFO.