This paper presents two-swim operators to be added to the chemotaxis process of the modified bacterial foraging optimization algorithm to solve three instances of the synthesis of four-bar planar mechanisms. One swim favors exploration while the second one promotes fine movements in the neighborhood of each bacterium. The combined effect of the new operators looks to increase the production of better solutions during the search. As a consequence, the ability of the algorithm to escape from local optimum solutions is enhanced. The algorithm is tested through four experiments and its results are compared against two BFOA-based algorithms and also against a differential evolution algorithm designed for mechanical design problems. The overall results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other BFOA-based approaches and finds highly competitive mechanisms, with a single set of parameter values and with less evaluations in the first synthesis problem, with respect to those mechanisms obtained by the differential evolution algorithm, which needed a parameter fine-tuning process for each optimization problem.
The stepsize value is one of the most sensitive parameters in the bacterial foraging optimization algorithm when solving constrained numerical optimization problems. In this paper, four stepsize control mechanisms are proposed and analyzed in the modified bacterial foraging optimization algorithm. The first one is based on a random value which remains fixed during the search, the second one generates a random value per cycle, the third one is based on a nonlinear decreasing function and the last one is an adaptive approach. Seven experiments are proposed to evaluate the abilities of each mechanism to: (1) obtain competitive final results, (2) find feasible solutions, (3) find the feasible global optimum, (4) promote successful swims, and (5) decrease the constraint violation. A comparison against two state-of-theart algorithms is considered to evaluate the performance of the most competitive control mechanism. A well-known set of constrained numerical optimization problems is used in the experiments as well as six performance measures. The results obtained show that the control mechanism based on the nonlinear decreasing function is the most competitive and provides the ability to generate better solutions late in the search.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.