Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) Technique in Economic Power Dispatch Problems

Abstract

Most of electrical power utilities in the world are required to ensure that electrical energy requirement from the customer is served smoothly in accordance to the respective policy of the country. Despite serving the power demands of the country, the power utility has also to ensure that the electrical power is generated within minimal cost. Thus, the total demand must be appropriately shared among the generating units with an objective to minimize the total generation cost for the system in order to satisfy the economic operation of the system. Economic dispatch is a procedure to determine the electrical power to be generated by the committed generating units in a power system so that the total generation cost of the system is minimized, while satisfying the load demand simultaneously. This paper presents the economic power dispatch problems solved using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) technique. ACO is a meta-heuristic approach for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. In this study, the proposed technique was tested using the standard IEEE 26-Bus RTS and the results revealed that the proposed technique has the merit in achieving optimal solution for addressing the problems. Comparative studies with other optimization technique namely the artificial immune system (AIS) were also conducted in order to highlight the strength of the proposed technique.