A Cooperative Structure-Redesigned-Based Bacterial Foraging Optimization with Guided and Stochastic Movements

The nested loop adopted in the original bacterial foraging optimization (BFO) is quite time-consuming and is the main reason for the complex computational process. Thus, in our previous work, an improved BFO with structure redesigned mechanism (SRBFO) is used to address this problem. Since the bacterial chemotaxis with stochastic direction in the original BFO has an adverse effect on the convergence rate, this paper proposes a new cooperative chemotactic movement strategy. In this cooperative strategy, some bacteria are selected to move toward a guided direction based on a predefined probability, while the other bacteria still swim to a stochastic direction as exhibited in the original BFO. By this strategy, all the bacteria alternatively use the guided movement and the stochastic movement to cooperatively balance global search and local search. The proposed improved algorithm is called Cooperative SRBFO (CSRBFO). A comparison of the CSRBFO with other BFOs has been made to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.