Title: The ant colony optimisation solving continuous problems

Authors: Ioannis Karakonstantis; Aristidis Vlachos

Addresses: Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, 80, Karaoli & Dimitriou str., 18534 Piraeus, Greece ' Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, 80, Karaoli & Dimitriou str., 18534 Piraeus, Greece

Abstract: This paper presents an approach for solving the economic power dispatch (EPD) problem using the ant colony optimisation for continuous domains (ACOR) algorithm (Socha and Dorigo, 2008). ACO family algorithms are inspired by the way that real ants searching for their food (Dorigo and Stutzle, 2004). When they find the source of food they deposit an amount of pheromone on their way in order to guide the other ants of the colony. Ants use pheromone trails as a mean of communication in order to find shortest paths between the food and their nest. We apply ACOR algorithm and two modifications of it, modified ACOR (M-ACOR) and ACOR with pattern search (PS-ACOR) to the well-known problem of EPD and compare the results with other methods presented in literature for solving the EPD.

Keywords: economic power dispatch; EPD; valve point effect; ant colony optimisation; ACO; continuous domains; ACOR; pattern search; continuous optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCISTUDIES.2013.057637

International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies, 2013 Vol.2 No.3/4, pp.350 - 366

Received: 19 Jul 2012
Accepted: 01 Aug 2012
Published online: 19 Jul 2014 *

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