Economic dispatch by ant colony search algorithm

In this paper, ant colony search algorithm (ACSA) is proposed to solve the economic dispatch (ED) with transmission losses problem. ACSA is a new cooperative agents approach, which is inspired by the observation of the behaviors of real ant colonies on the topic of ant trail formation and foraging methods. In the ACSA, a set of cooperating agents called "ants" cooperates to find a good solution for economic dispatch problem. The merits of ACSA are parallel search and optimization capabilities. The feasibility of the proposed method is tested on the IEEE 30 bus system and compared to Lambda iteration method and genetic algorithm.