The bee colony optimization algorithm and its convergence

Abstract

The bee colony optimization (BCO) algorithm is a nature-inspired meta-heuristic method for dealing with hard, real-life combinatorial and continuous optimisation problems. It is based on the foraging habits of honeybees and was proposed by Lučić and Teodorović in 2001. BCO is a simple, but effective meta-heuristic method that has already been successfully applied to various combinatorial optimisation problems in transport, location analysis, scheduling and some other fields. This paper provides theoretical verification of the BCO algorithm by proving some convergence properties. As a result, the gap between successful practice and missing theory is reduced.