Solution to Economic Load Dispatch Problem Based on BFO, CBFO-S and CBFO-H Algorithms and Its Advantages over the PSO

The Economic Load Dispatch problem (ELD) decides the minimum economic cost of production in a given power system, while keeping the environmental constraints and the load demand to an acceptable level without compromising on the generator ratings. Analysis on this application have been made using multi-modal Bacteria Foraging Optimization(BFO) algorithm, where the bacterial motion is incorporated as a search algorithm in finding the optimum values for economic generation. An improvisation on this algorithm is the cooperative bacteria foraging optimization using serial decomposition (CBFO-s) and CBFO-hybrid that combines BFO and CBFO-s. The search space decomposition and stochastic analysis ensures greater precision and accuracy in cost functions compared to conventional methods of Lagrange's multipliers and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). This paper illustrates these points with the ELD problem as a reference.