Ant Direction Hybrid Differential Evolution for Solving Economic Dispatch of Power System

This paper presents an ant direction hybrid differential evolution (ADHDE) method for solving the economic dispatch (ED) problem in power systems. The ADHDE utilizes the concept of an ant colony search to find a suitable mutation operator in the hybrid differential evolution (HDE) method, to accelerate the search for the global solution. Two economic dispatch problems, including the six and fifteen unit power systems, are applied to compare the performance of the proposed method with those of genetic algorithm (GAs) and simulated annealing (SA). Numerical results indicate that the proposed ADHDE method outperforms the SA and GA methods.