An adaptive chaotic artificial bee colony algorithm for short-term hydrothermal generation scheduling

Short-term hydrothermal scheduling (SHS) is a complicated nonlinear optimization problem with a set of constraints, which plays an important role in power system operations. In this paper, we propose to use an adaptive chaotic artificial bee colony (ACABC) algorithm to solve the SHS problem. In the proposed method, chaotic search is applied to help the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm to escape from a local optimum effectively. Furthermore, an adaptive coordinating mechanism of modification rate in employed bee phase is introduced to increase the ability of the algorithm to avoid premature convergence. Moreover, a new constraint handling method is combined with the ABC algorithm in order to solve the equality coupling constraints. We used a hydrothermal test system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The numerical results obtained by ACABC are compared with those obtained by the adaptive ABC algorithm (AABC), the chaotic ABC algorithm (CABC) and other methods mentioned in literature. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method outperforms those established optimization algorithms. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.