Copyright © 2009 Hanning Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Bacterial Foraging Optimization (BFO) is a novel optimization algorithm based on the social foraging behavior of E. coli bacteria. This paper presents a variation on the original BFO algorithm, namely, the Cooperative Bacterial Foraging Optimization (CBFO), which significantly improve the original BFO in solving complex optimization problems. This significant improvement is achieved by applying two cooperative approaches to the original BFO, namely, the serial heterogeneous cooperation on the implicit space decomposition level and the serial heterogeneous cooperation on the hybrid space decomposition level. The experiments compare the performance of two CBFO variants with the original BFO, the standard PSO and a real-coded GA on four widely used benchmark functions. The new method shows a marked improvement in performance over the original BFO and appears to be comparable with the PSO and GA.