Artificial bee colony algorithm with dynamic population size to combined economic and emission dispatch problem

•Artificial Bee Colony with Dynamic Population size (ABCDP) is proposed.•Environmental economic power dispatch problem has been solved by ABCDP.•Adaptive parameter control is used in ABCDP.•IEEE 30 bus and 40-generator units test systems have been used as the test case.•The obtained values have been compared with the state-of-the-art results.

Incremental Artificial Bee Colony algorithm with Local Search (IABC-LS) is one of efficient variant of artificial bee colony optimization which was successfully applied to economic power dispatch problems before. However IABC-LS algorithm has some tunable parameters which are directly affecting the algorithm behavior. In this study, we have introduced a new algorithm namely Artificial Bee Colony with Dynamic Population size (ABCDP) which is using similar mechanisms defined in IABC-LS without using many parameters to be tuned. To prove the efficiency and robustness of algorithm in power dispatch, the algorithm is used for the combined economic and emission dispatch problem which is converted into single objective optimization problem. For fair comparison, the parameters of both IABC and ABCDP algorithms are determined via automatic parameter configuration tool, Iterated F-Race. IEEE 30 bus test system and 40-generator units problem are used as the problem instances. The results of the algorithms indicate that ABCDP is giving good results in both systems and very competitive with the state-of-the-art.