International Conference on Innovations In Intelligent Instrumentation, Optimization And Signal Processing “ICIIIOSP-2013” 5 A Hybrid ABC-GA Solution for the Economic Dispatch of Generation in Power System

The power system optimization is one of the most important aspects of power engineering with respect to cost. The running cost of the thermal power plant is high. The main objective of this paper is to minimize the total fuel cost of the thermal power plant. Economic dispatch is the optimal allocation of power to various generating units satisfying power system constraints such that the minimum overall fuel cost is achieved. This paper proposes a novel heuristic hybrid optimization method designed to solve the economic dispatch problem in power systems. The proposed methodology improves the overall search capability of two powerful heuristic optimization algorithms: Artificial Bee colony (ABC) and Genetic Algorithm (GA). Here, the minimum fuel cost of thermal power plant with six generators is determined using a hybrid ABC-GA technique and is proved to give less cost than GA and ABC. The proposed technique is implemented using optimization toolbox in the MATLAB environment