Ant Colony Optimization for Continuous Domains applied to Emission and Economic Dispatch Problems

This paper presents a new approach for solving a family of optimization problems usually met in electrical power generation facilities. The objective in this family of problems is to minimize the emission cost, the economic cost or a combination of them while further constraints met. In this paper we present a way to handle the Economic Load Dispatch problem (ELD), the Minimum Emission Dispatch problem (MED), the Combined Economic and Emission Dispatch problem (CEED) which is a multi-objective optimization problem and the Emission Controlled Economic Dispatch problem (ECED) using an Ant Colony Optimization for Continuous Domains (ACOR) algorithm. This algorithm can be applied to continuous optimization problems subject to constraints, and it is able to converge to global optimum while escaping from local optimum. To show its efficiency and effectiveness the proposed M -ACOR algorithm is applied to several case studies composed of 6 generators for demands 500 MW, 700MW, 900MW and 1100 MW while taking into consideration the power losses.