Hybrid harmony search and artificial bee colony algorithm for global optimization problems

Harmony search (HS) is one of the newest and the easiest to code music inspired heuristics for optimization problems. In order to enhance the accuracy and convergence rate of harmony search, a hybrid harmony search is proposed by incorporating the artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC). The artificial bee colony algorithm is a new swarm intelligence technique inspired by intelligent foraging behavior of honey bees. The ABC and its variants are used to improve harmony memory (HM). To compare and analyze the performance of our proposed hybrid algorithms, a number of experiments are carried out on a set of well-known benchmark global optimization problems. The effects of the parameters about the hybrid algorithms are discussed by a uniform design experiment. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithms can find better solutions when compared to HS and other heuristic algorithms and are powerful search algorithms for various global optimization problems.