A Cooperative Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm and its application to Fashion Color Forecast in Clothing

This paper presents a hierarchical cooperative artificial bee colony algorithm based on divide-and-conquer decomposition strategy (HCABC-D), for fashion color forecast in clothing. In the proposed algorithm, classical artificial bee colony is extended to cooperative and hierarchical structure. The top level is responsible for information aggregation from lower level and information exchange based on crossover operator. In the bottom level, each sub-population also adopts the canonical ABC algorithm to search the part-dimensional landscape. Furthermore, HCABC-D and ABC are applied in forecasting fashion color in clothing. The results show that HCABC-D provides extremely competitive performance. The comparison between forecasting results and ones issued by PANTONE Inc. demonstrates its performance superiority.