Environmental economic dispatch using improved artificial bee colony algorithm

Abstract

Due to emissions from fossil fuel consumption in power plants, not only operational costs, but the minimization of the resulting pollution should be also considered in environmental economic dispatch problem. In this research, environmental economic dispatch problem is solved by minimization of operational cost and environmental pollution considering nonlinear constraints of generating units, forbidden regions, and ramp-rate of generating units using an improved artificial bee colony technique. With the proposed approach, data transactions among bees have been conducted using Newton’s and gravitational laws, leading to a full employment of honey bees mating optimization’s capability in finding the optimum solution. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, it is tested on IEEE 6-bus and IEEE 11-bus power systems in different load levels. Then, the obtained results are compared with those of other previously validated techniques. It is revealed that the proposed technique is superior in terms of accuracy and speed in solving power system complex problems over the other methods. In addition, it is unlikely for this approach to be trapped in local minima. Results compared to many recent competitive methods confirm the efficiency of the proposed method in term of solution quality and convergence characteristics.