Application of Artificial Bee Colony to economic load dispatch problem with ramp rate limits and prohibited operating zones

This paper presents the application of bio-inspired artificial bee colony (ABC) optimization to constrained economic load dispatch problem. Independent simulations were performed over various systems with different number of generating units having constraints like prohibited operating zones and ramp rate limits. The performance is also compared with other existing similar approaches. The proposed methodology was found to be robust, fast converging and more proficient over other existing techniques.