An improved artificial bee colony optimization algorithm based on orthogonal learning for optimal power flow problem

The increasing fuel price has led to high operational cost and therefore, advanced optimal dispatch schemes need to be developed to reduce the operational cost while maintaining the stability of grid. This study applies an improved heuristic approach, the improved Artificial Bee Colony (IABC) to optimal power flow (OPF) problem in electric power grids. Although original ABC has provided robust solutions for a range of problems, such as the university timetabling, training neural networks and optimal distributed generation allocation, its poor exploitation often causes solutions to be trapped in local minima. Therefore, in order to adjust the exploitation and exploration of ABC, the IABC based on the orthogonal learning is proposed. Orthogonal learning is a strategy to predict the best combination of two solution vectors based on limited trials instead of exhaustive trials, and to conduct deep search in the solution space. To assess the proposed method, two fuel cost objective functions with high non-linearity and non-convexity are selected for the OPF problem. The proposed IABC is verified by IEEE-30 and 118 bus test systems. In all case studies, the IABC has shown to consistently achieve a lower cost with smaller deviation over multiple runs than other modern heuristic optimization techniques. For example, the quadratic fuel cost with valve effect found by IABC for 30 bus system is 919.567 $/hour, saving 4.2% of original cost, with 0.666 standard deviation. Therefore, IABC can efficiently generate high quality solutions to nonlinear, nonconvex and mixed integer problems.