Optimal Foraging Algorithm Based on Differential Evolution

The optimal foraging algorithm (OFA) was proposed by summarizing the rules of the animal foraging behavior in a group. Therefore OFA also has the defects of the swarm intelligence algorithm, such as easy to trap into local optimum and low convergence accuracy. In order to overcome these defects, an optimal foraging algorithm based on differential evolution (DEOFA) is proposed. The differential evolution mechanism contains mutation and crossover operators. The mutation and crossover operators are used to accelerate the convergence speed and global search capability of the OFA. The mutation operator is adopted to perform mutation operations centered on the optimal individual of each iteration to raise the convergence accuracy of the OFA. The test results of 30 benchmark functions show that the performance of DEOFA is better than nine compared algorithms in search accuracy, convergence speed and robustness. In order to verify the effectiveness of the DEOFA in solving practical problems, DEOFA is applied to solve the 0-1 knapsack problem. The test results in the six examples of 0-1 knapsack problems indicate that the DEOFA achieves better performance in accuracy, stability and high dimension.