Binary Artificial Bee Colony optimization using bitwise operation

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm has been applied to many scientific and engineering problems for its easy of use and efficiency. However, the original ABC technique cannot be used in a binary search space directly. This paper proposes an effective binary ABC algorithm, or BitABC, that has a similar framework to the original ABC but uses a bitwise operation for the movements of the employed bees and onlooker bees. Experiments have been carried out by comparing BitABC with three binary ABC variants, DisABC, normABC, and BinABC, and the most used binary search technique, GA, on a set of 13 selected benchmark functions. Results show that the proposed BitABC performs better than, or at least comparable to, the other algorithms in terms of the final solution accuracy, convergence speed, and robustness.