Economic dispatch of power systems based on generalized ant colony optimization method

A new versatile optimization algorithm called generalized ant colony optimization (GACO) is presented. The economic dispatch (ED) problem of power systems be solved by the algorithm. The GACO is based on the concepts of ant colony optimization for combinatorial optimization problems. The positive feedback, distributed computation, and the constructive greedy heuristic are used in the algorithm to solve the discontinuous, nonconvex, nonlinear constrained optimization problems. The convergence property of the GACO is discussed based on the fixed-point theory on a complete metric space. Several sufficient conditions for convergence are presented. The algorithm is tested and validated in several cases. In these cases, the GACO can provide accurate dispatch solutions in reasonable time. The results show that the GACO for the ED problem is versatile, robust and efficient.