As a newly developed metaheuristic algorithm, the artificial bee colony (ABC) has garnered a lot of interest because of its strong exploration ability and easy implementation. However, its exploitation ability is poor and dramatically deteriorates for high-dimension and/or non-separable functions. To fix this defect, a self-adaptive ABC with a candidate strategy pool (SAABC-CS) is proposed. First, several search strategies with different features are assembled in the strategy pool. The top 10% of the bees make up the elite bee group. Then, we c...