Generalized ant colony optimization for economic dispatch of power systems

Based on the ant colony optimization (ACO) for combinatorial optimization problems, this paper presents a new versatile optimization algorithm called generalized ant colony optimization (GACO), which can be used to solve the discontinuous, nonconvex, nonlinear constrained optimization problems. This paper also studies the convergence property of GACO based on the fixed-point theorem on a complete metric space, presents a sufficient condition for convergence. This algorithm is used to solve the complicated, nonconvex, nonlinear economic dispatch (ED) problem of power systems. Several factors such as, valve-point effects of fuel cost functions, transmission capacity constraints, and system stability constraints are considered in the computation models. Numerical results show that the proposed method is feasible and efficient.