Dynamic adaptive bacterial foraging algorithm for optimum economic dispatch with valve-point effects and wind power

This study presents a dynamically adapted bacterial foraging algorithm (BFA) to solve the economic dispatch (ED) problem considering valve-point effects and power losses. In addition, wind power is included in the problem formulation. Renewable sources and wind energy in particular have recently been getting more interest because of various environmental and economical considerations. The original BFA is a recently developed evolutionary optimisation technique inspired by the foraging behaviour of the Escherichia coli bacteria. The basic BFA has been successfully implemented to solve small optimisation problems; however, it shows poor convergence characteristics for larger constrained problems. To deal with the complexity and high-dimensioned search space of the ED problem, essential modifications are introduced to enhance the performance of the algorithm. The basic chemotactic step is adjusted to have a dynamic non-linear behaviour in order to improve balancing the global and local search. The stopping criterion of the original BFA is also modified to be adaptive depending on the solution improvement instead of the preset maximum number of iterations. The proposed algorithm is validated using several test systems. The results are compared with those obtained by other algorithms previously applied to solve the problem considering valve-point effects and power losses in addition to wind power.