An adaptive artificial bee colony algorithm for long-term economic dispatch in cascaded hydropower systems

In this paper, we present a novel adaptive artificial bee colony (AABC) algorithm and compare its efficiency with other existing algorithms for long-term dispatch of cascaded hydropower systems. We formulate the long-term economic dispatch of hydropower systems as a complicated nonlinear optimization problem with a group of complex constraints. We analyze the performances of three different values of the control parameter modification rate (MR) in the AABC. We modify the employed bee phase to improve the global optimal capability of the AABC algorithm, and utilize a novel probabilistic method to enhance the search ability of the onlooker bee phase. Furthermore, we change the scout bee phase to avoid local maxima. We demonstrate the performance of the AABC algorithm and compare it with other algorithms using the data from hydropower systems of Three Gorges in China. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.