An Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for the Multidimensional Knapsack Problem

Abstract

The Multidimensional Knapsack Problem (MDKP) stands as a prominent challenge in combinatorial optimization, with diverse applications across various domains. The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is a swarm intelligence optimization algorithm inspired by the foraging behavior of bees. The aim of this paper is to develop an ABC with the goal of improving the solution quality in comparison to previous studies for the MDKP. In the proposed ABC algorithm, a heuristic method is presented to make employed bees. The roulette wheel and k-tournament methods are investigated for selecting employed bees by onlooker bees. For crossing over, two methods including one-point and uniform are studied. To tune the parameters, the Design of Experiment (DOE) method has been applied. The well-known benchmark test problems have been used to evaluate the proposed algorithm. The results show the absolute superiority of the solutions generated by the proposed algorithm in compared with the previous studies.