Abstract: Aiming at the weak quorum sensing ability and slow convergence in bacterial foraging algorithm, an algorithm with gravitational mechanism is proposed. The algorithm provides an optimization direction for each bacterium by introducing a gravitational mechanism in the gravitational search algorithm. The original swimming operation of bacterial foraging algorithm is used to realize the local optimization strategy, and the local dimension update is added after the swimming to widen the bacterial search scope in chemotaxis operation. In the migration operation of the bacterial foraging algorithm, the bimodal Gaussian function is introduced to re-initialize the position of the bacteria to avoid falling into the local extremum for the algorithm and improves the optimization ability. The experiments prove that the improved bacterial foraging algorithm has better searching ability than the basic algorithm.

Key words: bacterial foraging algorithm, gravitational search algorithm, local dimension update, Gaussian function, function optimization