Bacterial foraging algorithm for optimum economic-emission dispatch

This paper presents a modified bacterial foraging algorithm (MBFA) to solve the economic-emission dispatch problem (EED) considering power losses. The weighted-sum method is utilized to solve this bi-objective economic-emission dispatch problem. The basic bacterial foraging algorithm (BFA) is a developed evolutionary optimization technique inspired by the foraging behavior of the E. coli bacteria. The original BFA has been successfully used for small scale optimization problems. On the other hand, when it is applied to larger constrained problems, it shows poor convergence characteristics. To overcome these difficulties, due to the complexity and high-dimensionality of the search space of the EED problem, important modifications are proposed to enhance the performance of the BFA. The MBFA is validated using a well known test system.