Artificial bee colony optimization for multi-area economic dispatch

This paper presents artificial bee colony optimization for solving multi-area economic dispatch (MAED) problem with tie line constraints considering transmission losses, multiple fuels, valve-point loading and prohibited operating zones. Artificial bee colony optimization is a swarm-based algorithm inspired by the food foraging behavior of honey bees. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been verified on three different test systems, both small and large, involving varying degree of complexity. Compared with differential evolution, evolutionary programming and real coded genetic algorithm, considering the quality of the solution obtained, the proposed algorithm seems to be a promising alternative approach for solving the MAED problems in practical power system.