Ant Lion Optimizer based Approach for Optimal Scheduling of Thermal Units for Small Scale Electrical Economic Power Dispatch Problem

Abstract

A novel nature inspired algorithm ant lion optimizer (ALO) is recently developed which is motivated from the hunting mechanism of ant lions .Inherit steps of hunting prey such as the random walk of ants, building traps, entrapment of ants in traps, catching preys, and re-building are simulated to find the optimal solution of real life problems . Intelligent and Optimization techniques based on evolutionary computing, metaheuristic,biological base,nature inspired, search method establish their applications in the area of electrical economic power dispatch planning(EEPDP) to reach global optimal solution for this multi scale, multi-decision, multi-objective combinatorial problem subjected to different constraints.An application of ALO to solve non linear electric economic power dispatch problem(EEPDP) is proposed in this paper. Efficient and optimal planning of economic electrical power dispatch problem is an integral part of economic electrical energy generation planning and it is the need of time for the electrical engineers to browse this area in multi-scale planning scenarios.. The performance of s ant lion optimizer (ALO) to solve electrical economic power dispatch problem is tested on three and six unit system.Test results are compared with other techniques grey wolf optimization(GWO),cuckoo search(CS),artificial bee colony(ABC),firefly algorithm(FA),particle swarm optimization(PSO),shuffled frog leap (SFL) ,bacteria foraging algorithm(BFO),harmony search(HS) applied in literature. Simulation results proved that the ALO technique is better as compared to other nature inspired,heuristic,metaheuristic techniques to find global minima and maintain the solution quality in terms of low fuel cost.