An enhanced artificial bee colony algorithm with adaptive differential operators

Zhengping Liang, Kaifeng Hu, Quanxiang Zhu, Zexuan Zhu

Abstract: Highlights•An adaptive differential operator is embedded into the employed bee phase of Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm.•A stair-step probability calculation method is designed for onlooker bees.•A novel ABC variant namely ABCADE is formed by combing ABC and the two proposed components.•ABCADE obtains superior or comparable performance to other representative state-of-the-art ABC and DE algorithms.