Solving Economic Load Dispatch Problems with Valve Point Effects Using Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

摘要

This paper addresses an Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm to find the feasible optimal solution of the economic load dispatch (ELD) problem with various generator constraints in power systems. For practical generator operation, many nonlinear constraints of the generator, such as ramp rate limits, prohibited operating zone, generation limits, transmission line loss and non-smooth cost functions are all considered using the proposed method. The ABC algorithm describes the food foraging behavior, memorizing and information sharing characteristics of honey bee swarm to find the best possible solution within a reasonable computation time. It carries out both global and local search in each iteration process for significant increasing the probability of finding the optimal solution and efficiently avoiding local optimum to a large extent. For this reason, ABC algorithm is used to solve ELD problem in order to efficiently control the local search and convergence to the global optimum and solution quality. Effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated for three different systems, including 6, 15 and 40 unit generating in comparison with the performance of the other recently optimization algorithms reported in the literature in terms of the solution quality and computation efficiency. The results analysis confirms that the proposed approach has an excellent capability to determine optimal solution of the ELD problems over the other existing methods and enhances efficiently the solutions quality of the power systems.