An improved artificial bee colony algorithm for directing orbits of chaotic systems

Artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) is a relatively new optimization technique which has been shown to be competitive to other population‐based algorithms. However, there is still an insufficiency in ABC regarding its solution search equation, which is good at exploration but poor at exploitation. To address this concerning issue, we propose an improved ABC (IABC) by using a modified search strategy to generate a new food source in order that the exploration and exploitation can be well balanced and satisfactory optimization performances can be achieved. In addition, to enhance the global convergence, when producing the initial population, both opposition‐based learning method and chaotic maps are employed. In this paper, the proposed algorithm is applied to control and synchronization of discrete chaotic systems which can be formulated as both multimodal numerical optimization problems with high dimension. Numerical simulation and comparisons with some typical existing algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.