Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Guiding the Accessibility Optimization Problem of a Guide Sign System

For a destination, there are many guide signs guiding to it. These guide signs form some guiding paths to the destination. But not all of the guiding paths can guide people to their destinations successfully. This paper presents an efficient model to solve the guiding accessibility optimization problem of guide signs. The goal of this optimization model is a plan for an optimal guiding path for each existing problematic guiding path which can not guide people to a certain destination successfully. In this model, the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is employed as the main optimizer. In this paper, the cost of each planned guiding path includes two parts, the path length, and the number of deployed new guide signs. The optimal planned guiding path is obtained by minimizing the cost. Finally, the proposed model is applied in a typical area and the genetic algorithm is employed as the contrast for comparison. The experimental results show that the ABC algorithm performs better for solving the guiding accessibility optimization problem of guide sign system than the GA algorithm does.