Artificial bee colony algorithm, its variants and applications: A survey

Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm (ABC) is nature-inspired metaheuristic, which imitates the foraging behavior of bees. ABC as a stochastic technique is easy to implement, has fewer control parameters, and could easily be modify and hybridized with other metaheuristic algorithms. Due to its successful implementation, several researchers in the optimization and artificial intelligence domains have adopted it to be the main focus of their research work. Since 2005, several related works have appeared to enhance the performance of the standard ABC in the literature, to meet up with challenges of recent research problems being encountered. Interestingly, ABC has been tailored successfully, to solve a wide variety of discrete and continuous optimization problems. Some other works have modified and hybridized ABC to other algorithms, to further enhance the structure of its framework. In this review paper, we provide a thorough and extensive overview of most research work focusing on the application of ABC, with the expectation that it would serve as a reference material to both old and new, incoming researchers to the field, to support their understanding of current trends and assist their future research prospects and directions. The advantages, applications and drawbacks of the newly developed ABC hybrids are highlighted, critically analyzed and discussed accordingly.