Title: Examining the role of perception, social and private information in honey bee foraging algorithms

Authors: Anthony Brabazon; Wei Cui; Michael O'Neill

Addresses: Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory and School of Business, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland ' Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory and School of Business, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland ' Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory and School of Business, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Abstract: The last decade has seen the development of a family of powerful optimisation algorithms inspired by the foraging behaviours of honey bees. A key component of these algorithms is the concept of 'recruitment' whereby successful foragers transmit information to other colony members concerning the location of discovered resources and thereby 'recruit' for that location. However, real-world foraging by honey bees is much more complex and embeds a number of additional features, including individual sensory 'perception', 'noisy' recruitment, and 'private information' (memory). In this study, we develop a series of algorithms which embed these features and assess the impact of each on the effectiveness of the resulting search performance on a series of benchmark problems representing differing resource landscapes. The simulation results support findings from the empirical study of real-world honey bees that recruitment is not a unique driver of successful foraging activity and that private information also plays an important role. This finding is relevant for the design of honey bee optimisation algorithms.

Keywords: honey bee algorithms; social foraging; honey bee optimisation algorithms; social information; private information; sensory perception; honey bee foraging; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICA.2013.063050

International Journal of Innovative Computing and Applications, 2013 Vol.5 No.4, pp.240 - 261

Received: 25 Apr 2014
Accepted: 06 May 2014

Published online: 31 Jul 2014 *

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