ABCO: Adaptive Bacterial Colony Optimisation

This paper introduces a new optimisation algorithm, called Adaptive Bacterial Colony Optimisation (ABCO), modelled after the foraging behaviour of E. coli bacteria. The algorithm follows three stages–explore, exploit and reproduce–and is adaptable to meet the requirements of its applications. The performance of the proposed ABCO algorithm is compared to that of established optimisation algorithms–particle swarm optimisation (PSO) and ant colony optimisation (ACO)–on a set of benchmark functions. Experimental results demonstrate the benefits of the adaptive nature of the proposed algorithm: ABCO runs much faster than PSO and ACO while producing competitive results and outperforms PSO and ACO in a scenario where the running time is not crucial.