Quantum Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm

This paper proposes a novel swarm intelligence optimization method which integrates bacterial foraging optimization (BFO) with quantum computing, called quantum bacterial foraging optimization (QBFO) algorithm. In QBFO, a multi-qubit which can represent a linear superposition of states in search space probabilistically is used to represent a bacterium, so that the quantum bacteria representation has a better characteristic of population diversity. A quantum rotation gate is designed to simulate the chemotactic step to drive the bacteria toward better solutions. Several tests are conducted based on benchmark functions including multi-peak function to evaluate optimization performance of the proposed algorithm. The numeric results show that the proposed QBFO has more powerful properties in convergence rate, stability and the ability of searching for the global optimal solution than the original BFO and quantum genetic algorithm. In addition, we applied our proposed QBFO to solve the traveling salesman problem, which is a well-known NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization. The results indicate that the proposed QBFO shows better convergence behavior without premature convergence, and has more powerful properties in convergence rate, stability and the ability of searching for the global optimal solution, as compared to ant colony optimization algorithm and quantum genetic algorithm.