Evaluating the performance of an artificial bee colony algorithm for solving a economic dispatch problem

This paper proposes a Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm for solving a Economic Dispatch (ED). We apply the algorithm to simulate fifteen thermoelectric generator units, considering transmission losses and restrictions on the potency of the generating units. For the same problem, we compared the ABC implementation with other algorithms like the method of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Fireflies Algorithm (FA) and the method of Lagrange multipliers. Our results show that the ABC solution is 0.05% better than the PSO solution, with a computational effort (number of iterations) of 69.30% lower. The FA solution, although it is 1.05% better than the ABC solution, requires a computational effort of 95.28% greater in relation to ABC. Although the ABC has not been as effective as the FA to find the best solution, it proved to be a fast convergence method and a low computational cost, of 3.45 seconds. Therefore, we conclude that the ABC proved to be the most efficient method, due to the small computational effort required in its processing.