To bee or not to bee—comments on “Discrete optimum design of truss structures using artificial bee colony algorithm”

An Artificial Bee Colony algorithm was presented by Sonmez (StructMultidisc Optim 43:85–97, 2011) for solving discrete truss design problems. It was numerically tested on four benchmark examples and concluded to be robust and efficient. We compare the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm numerically to three alternative heuristics on the same benchmark examples. The most advanced heuristics presented herein find equally good, or better, designs compared to those presented in Sonmez (Struct Multidisc Optim 43:85–97, 2011). However, for the largest benchmark example, we use four orders of magnitude fewer function evaluations.