DEVELOPING OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM

USING ARTIFICIAL BEE COLONY SYSTEM

Saif Mahmood Saab

Arab Academy for Banking and Financial Sciences, Amman–Jordan
saif.alsaab@gmail.com
Dr. Nidhal Kamel Taha El-Omari
The World Islamic Sciences & Education University (WISE) ), Amman–Jordan
omari_nidhal@yahoo.com
Dr. Hussein H. Owaied
Middle East University for Graduate Studies, Amman–Jordan
howaied@meu.edu.jo

ABSTRACT
More recently, computer scientists have found in the study of social insect’s behavior a
source of inspiration for the design and implementation of optimization algorithms.
Particularly, the study of bee colonies behavior turned out to be very attractive to develop
problem solving algorithms. However, this paper introduces a new algorithm that are
inspired by bee colonies. It presents two unsupervised scenarios for two kinds of bees
which are scouts and forgers in order to identify their activities that used by the bees
during the food forging, These activities have been analysis and designed as proposed
new optimization algorithms as the functions to be used by the processing engine of the
artificial bees colony system. The proposed algorithm can be applied to dynamic
problems in real variables, stochastic problems, multi-targets and parallel
implementations, and any areas which are not required supervision.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Expert systems, natural system, Problem Solving
algorithms, Swarm Intelligence (SI).

1 INTRODUCTION Swarm Intelligence (SI) [3]. However, SI is a type of

Since ever, many natural systems of the most
creatures in the world are very rich topics for the
scientific researchers. However, a simple individual
behavior can cooperate to create a system able to
solve a real complex problem and perform very
sophisticated tasks. In realty there are many patterns
of such systems like ant colonies, bird flocking, fish
shoaling, animal herding, bacterial growth, bee
colonies, and human neuron system.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a concept of study
and research for finding relationships between
cognitive science and computation theories [1].
These relationships are represented as data structures,
search techniques, problem solving methods, or
representation forms for knowledge [1]. These
systems are working either under supervision or
without supervision. Most of social insects work
without supervision. In fact, their teamwork is
largely self-organized, and coordination arises from
the different interactions among individuals in the
system [2]. These interactions might be primitive,
like ants follow odor trails, or more complex, like a
honey bee dancing. The collective behavior that
emerges from a group of social insects has been
artificially represented as a technique known as
AI where the term swarm is used in a general manner
to refer to any restrained collection of interacting
agents or individuals [2]. SI systems are typically
made up of a population of self-organized
individuals interacting locally with one another and
with their environment. Although there is normally
no centralized control structure dictating how each
individual should behave, local interactions between
all individuals often lead to the emergence of global
behavior.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 looks at the related work and background
of the algorithms used. Section 3 presents the
algorithm developed in this research. Finally, Section
4 provides conclusions and offers avenues for future
work.
2 BEES BEHAVIOR BACKGROUND
A bee colony can be thought of as a swarm
whose individual agents are bees. Each bee at the
low-level component works through a swarm at the
global level of component to form a system. Thus,
the system global behavior is determined from it is
individual's local behavior where the different
interactions and coordination among individuals lead
to an organized teamwork system. This system is
characterized by the interacting collective behavior
through labor division, distributed simultaneous task
performance, specialized individuals, and self-
organization.
The exchange of information among bees leads
to the formation of a tuned collective knowledge. A
colony of honey bees consists of a queen, many
drones (males) and thousands of workers (non-
reproductive females). The queen's job is to lay eggs
and to start new colonies. The sole function of the
drones is to mate with the queen and during the fall
they are ejected from the colony. The worker bees
build honeycomb, and the young, clean the colony,
feed the queen and drones, guard the colony, and
collect food.
As nectar is the bees' energy source, two kinds
of worker bees are responsible for food. These are
scout bees and forager bees. A bee does many things
in its life history, and does not become a scout/work
bee until late in its life [4].
While scout bees carry out the exploration
process of the search space, forager bees control the
exploitation process. However, exploration and
exploitation processes must be carried out together
by the colony’s explorers and colony’s exploiters. As
the increase in the number of scouts encourages the
exploration process, the increase of foragers
encourages the exploitation process.
Studying the foraging behavior leads to optimal
foraging theory that directs activities towards
achieving goals [5]. This theory states that organisms
forage in such a way as to maximize their intake
energy per unit time [5]. In other words, the swarm
of bees behaves in such a way as to find and capture
the food that containing the most energy while
expending the least possible amount of time in real
variables. There are two forms of scenarios for any
bee in forging process which are either scout or
forager. The following subsections present these two
scenarios:
2.1 The Behavior of Scout Scenario
Scouts fly around and search for food. When
they find a source of nectar or pollen fly back to the
colony and start dancing to communicate with other
bees on a particular region in the comb. Fig. 1
presents the decoding of the language of the Bee
dance [4].
Hence the behavior of the scout scenario is
summarized according to the following activities:
• The scout flies from its colony searching for food
sources in a random way.
• Once it finishes a full trip, it returns back to its
colony.
• When a scout arrives at the colony, it goes inside
and announces its presence by the wing vibrations.
This means that it has a message to communicate.
• If it has found a nearby source of nectar or pollen,
it undergoes a circular dance. The nearby bees
follow it through this circular dance and smell it
for the identity of the flowers. They listen to the
intensity of the wing vibrations to indicate the
value of the food source.
• If the source is so close, no directions are given.
Alternatively, if the flower source is a long ways
off, careful directions must be given.
• The abstract convention that the scout makes is
that the up position on the comb is the position of
the sun. Because bees can see polarized light, they
can tell sun position without actually seeing the
sun. The scout dances in a precise angle from the
vertical. This equals to the horizontal angle of the
sun with reference to the colony exit with the
location of the food source.
• Next the scout bee must tell the other bees how far
away the flower source is. This is done by
waggling the abdomen from side to side. The
slower the waggling, the further away is the
distance of the food flower.
Figure 1: Decoding the language of the Bee dance
Thus the dance of scouts points to the direction,
distance, and quality of food source. What Von
Frisch notes is that the various groups of scouting
bees compete with each other and that therefore the
decision is finally made in favor of the best domicile
[4].
2.2 The Behavior of Forger Scenario
The reaction of the forager bees on this show
concludes into steps:
• The bees in the colony closely follow the scout to
learn these directions, and also learn the odor of
the flower on scout bee, so they can find the flower
when they arrive at the source location.
• Because the sun is moving in the sky, the bees
should use an accurate clock sense to adjust for the
 changing sun position with reference to the food
source and the colony exit.
Even more remarkable, if a trained bee is
removed from the colony to another location where
the flower is not visible, but the colony is, the bee
does not return to the colony to get its bearing, but
reads sun position, and triangulates, and flies directly
to the flower [4]. Subsequently, the forager bees take
a load of nectar from the source and return to the
colony and unload the nectar to the store of food.
Foraging requires energy and the honeybee’s
evaluation as to where, what, and how long to forage
are all related to the economics of energy
consumption and the net gain of food to the colony.
Generally bees fly only as far as necessary to secure
an acceptable food source from which there is a net-
Interacting
with
Environment
Processing
Functions Engine
Long
Term Memory
Figure 2: Architecture of Artificial Bees’ Colony System
FS3,3
FS4,2
Colony
FS3,2
FS1,1
Figure 3: Bees-Colony Area
gain. Therefore, these are the factors that influence
foraging behavior and determine profitability. The
net rate of energy intake is defined as the energy
gained while foraging minus the energy spent on
foraging, divided by time spent foraging. [6]
3 PROPOSED ALGORITHM
A modeling of artificial bee colony system has
been proposed in [7], as seen in Fig. 2. This paper
proposes a new optimization algorithm that uses the
bee behavior in food forging as the functions to be
used by the processing engine. Fig. 3 illustrates a
simple example of Bees-Colony area with four orbits
and six food sources: FS1,1 , FS3,1 , FS3,2 , FS3,3 ,
FS4,1 , and FS4,2.
Short Term
Memory
Orbit 1
Orbit 2
Orbit 3
Orbit 4
FS3,1
FS4,1
The following notations are used in the proposed
algorithm:
1. X: number of scouts. Sx: the xth scout bee.
2. Y: number of foragers. Where FRy means the yth
forager bee.
3. N: number of bees in the colony population.
Where, N = X + Y.
Moreover, X = from 5% to 10% of N
4. I: number of orbits. Where “i” stands for the ith
orbit.
5. CM: colony moral, it is a parameter defined
algorithm goals.
6. FSij: Which means the jth food source at the ith
orbit?
7. M: Number of maximum iterations.
8. FSQij: Means the quality of the jth food source at
the ith orbit.
9. Dij: the direct distance between colony and FSij
(see Fig. 3).
10. FSGij: the net gain of energy from the food
source, FSij .
It is calculated based on the distance, Dij , and the
food source quality, FSQij. Where:
FSGij = FSQij / Dij
11. FSQTij: food source total quality is calculated
based on food source net gain, FSGij, and the
scout's rank SRx which find this food source in
this case the scout with a better food source will
be rewarded. Where FSQTij = FSGij + SRx.
12. SRx: the rank of the xth scout and this value will
be updated every time forger chooses the source
found by this scout.
13. FSVij: number of visits by the forgers for FSij.
There are two tables that will be used by the
proposed algorithm, these are:
• FTT: Food Taboo Table, as seen in Table 1, this
table contains all food sources that had been
visited by the scouts. It is used to prevent more
scouts from visiting the same food source. This
table contains the parameters: FSij, Sx and Srx.
• JST: Job Sheet Table, as seen in Table 2, any food
source visited by scouts will be added to this table.
Each forager picks up one of the food sources,
FSij, to collect food from. This table contains the
following.

Table 1: Food Taboo Table (FTT)

FS Dij FSQij SRx FSGij FSQTij FSVij

FS11

FS12

FS21

FS22

FSij

Table 2: Job Sheet Table (JST)

FS Sx Srx

FS11

FS12

FS21

FS22

FSij
 The following algorithm represents the main algorithm can be applied to many combinatorial
steps of the proposed algorithm that used in this optimization problems, dynamic problems in real
paper: variables, stochastic problems, multi-targets; data
mining search engine crawling, parallel
1) Initialization: implementations, and any area not required
a) X: number of scouts. supervision.
b) Y: number of foragers.
c) N: number of bees in the colony population. 5 REFERENCES
d) I: number of orbits.
e) CM: colony moral. [1] Owaied H. Hussein , Abu-Arr’a M.
f) FSij: the jth food source at the ith orbit. Mahmoud :Functional Model of Human System
g) M: number of maximum iterations. as knowledge Base System , The International
h) FSQij: the quality of the food source, FSij . Conference on Information & Knowledge
i) Dij: the direct distance between colony and Engineering , pp. 158-161 (June 2007).
FSij (see Fig. 3). [2] Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to
2) Assumptions: Think About Business, Eric Bonabeau and
a) The food sources have been previously Christopher Meyer, Harvard business review,
defined. r0105g, (May 2001).
b) Every scout bee, Sx , visit only one food [3] Beni, G., and J. Wang. Swarm Intelligence. In
source, FSij , per each trip. Proceedings Seventh Annual Meeting of the
3) REPEAT X times (i.e. all scouts, X, finish one Robotics Society of Japan, Tokyo, RSJ Press, pp.
trip): 425-428 (1989).
{ [4] Von Frisch, Karl: Decoding the Language of the
a) Scout should choose one food source, Bee, Science, Volume 185, Issue 4152, pp. 663-
FSij, find its distance, Dij , quality FSQij, 668 (1974).
and net gain of energy FSGij: [5] Kamil, Alan C., John R. Krebs and H. Ronald
FSGij = FSQij / Dij Pulliam, Foraging Behavior, Plenum Press, New
b) Update JST table. York and London (1987).
c) Update FTT table. [6] Corbet, S.A., Kerslake, C.J.C., Brown, D. &
} Morland, N.E. Can bees select nectar-rich
REPEAT UNTIL the CM goal is achieved or flowers in a patch? Journal of Apicultural
reached the maximum number of iterations, M: Research, 23, pp. 234–242 (1984).
{ [7] Hussein Owaied, Saif Saab: Modeling Artificial
REPEAT Y times (i.e. all foragers, Y, Bees Colony System. IC-AI: pp. 443-446 (2008).
complete one trip): [8] T. D. Seeley, The Wisdom of the Hive (Harvard
{ University Press, Cambridge, MA,(1995).
(a) Generate a random number, RN.
(b) Calculate food source total quality
FSQTij = FSGij + SRx
(c) Foragers, FRy , choose which food
source, FSij , to forage by comparing
the random number, RN, with
FSQTij on the JS table.
If FSQTij > RN Then
Choose FSij and go to (h)
Else
Repeat (g)
End If
(d) Update JST.
(e) Update the CM.
}
}

4 CONCLUSION

This paper proposes an algorithm for the bee

colony system according to the two scenarios of
scouting and forging processes. The proposed