Solving Practical Economic Dispatch Problems Using Improved Artificial Bee Colony Method

This paper presents an improved artificial bee colony (IABC) optimization method to solving practical economic dispatch taking into account the nonlinear generator characteristics such as valve-point loading effects. In order to exploit the performance of this new variant based ABC method to solving practical economic dispatch, a new local search mechanism (LSM) associated to the original ABC algorithm; it allows exploiting effectively the promising region to locate the best solution. The proposed approach has been examined and applied to many practical electrical power systems, the 13 generating units, and to the large electrical system with 40 generating units considering valve point loading effects. From the different case studies, it is observed that the results compared with the other recent techniques demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach and show clearly its effectiveness to solve practical and large ED.