Cooperative approach to artificial bee colony algorithm for optimal power flow

Recently, the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm has been developed to efficiently and effectively solve a wide range of optimization problems. In this work, the standard ABC algorithm is extended by incorporating a cooperation approach, and an algorithm called cooperative ABC (CABC) is proposed to solve the optimal power flow (OPF) problem. CABC aims at improving the performance of the standard ABC algorithm by using multiple artificial bee colonies to optimized different components of the solution vector cooperatively. With six well known benchmarks, CABC is proved to have significant better performance improvement on the standard ABC. CABC is then applied to the real-world OPF problem on an IEEE 30-bus test system. The simulation results showed that the proposed CABC outperforms other algorithms investigated in this paper in terms of optimization accuracy and computation robustness.