Scientifically and rationally analyzing the characteristics of land use evolution and exploring future trends in land use changes can provide the scientific reference basis for the rational development and utilization of regional land resources and sustainable economic development. In this paper, an improved hybrid artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm based on the mutation of inferior solutions (MHABC) is introduced to combine with the cellular automata (CA) model to implement a new CA rule mining algorithm (MHABC-CA). To verify the capabilities of this algorithm, remote sensing data of three stages, 2005, 2010, and 2015, are adopted to dynamically simulate urban development of Dengzhou city in Henan province, China, using the MHABC-CA algorithm. The comprehensive validation and analysis of the simulation results are performed by two aspects of comparison, the visual features of urban land use types and the quantification analysis of simulation accuracy. Compared with a cellular automata model based on a particle swarm optimization (PSO-CA) algorithm, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the MHABC-CA algorithm in the prediction field of urban land use changes.