Economic load dispatch via an improved Bacterial Foraging Optimization

An economic dispatch is one of the most important research areas in power system. This is because an optimal power dispatch will contribute to a sound power system load management. As a result, the solution can ease the cost of fuel without ignoring the power operation constraints and system losses. Adaptive Tumble Bacterial Foraging Optimization (ATBFO) and Adaptive Mutation Bacterial Foraging Optimization (AMBFO), which are originally from basic Bacterial Foraging Optimization (BFO), are considered as alternative algorithms to minimize fuel cost. Thus, the two techniques are compared under the same parameters to determine the best optimal result. After several analyses on the results obtained, it was found that ATBFO outperformed AMBFO. Both of these adaptive bacterial foraging optimization techniques are tested on 26 bus Reliability test system using MATLAB R2009b on MS Window 7.