An Effective Method for Minimizing Electric Generation Costs of Thermal Systems with Complex Constraints and Large Scale

Abstract

In this paper, an improved antlion optimization algorithm (IALO) was proposed to search for promising solutions for optimal economic load dispatch (ELD) problems to minimize electrical generation fuel costs in power systems with thermal units and to ensure all constraints are within operating ranges. IALO can be more effective than the original method, called the antlion optimization algorithm (ALO), because of the high performance of the applied modifications on the new solutions searching process. In order to evaluate the abilities of the IALO method, we completed many tests on thermal generating systems including 10, 15, 20, 30, 60, 80, and 90 units with different constraints and fuel-consuming characteristics. The results suggest that the offered method is superior to the ALO method with more stable search ability, faster convergence velocity, and shorter calculation times. Furthermore, the obtained results of the IALO method are much better than those of almost all the other methods used to solve problems for the same systems. As a result, IALO is suggested to be a highly effective method, and it can be applied to other problems in power systems instead of ALO, which has a lower performance.