An Efficient Firefly Algorithm to Solve Economic Dispatch Problems

The Economic Dispatch(ED) problems are the major consideration in electric power generation systems in order to reduce the fuel cost their by reducing the total cost for the generation of electric power. This paper presents an Efficient and Reliable Firefly Algorithm (FA), for solving ED Problem. The main objective is to minimize the total fuel cost of the generating units having quadratic cost characteristics subjected to limits on generator true power output & transmission losses. The FA is a stochastic Meta heuristic approach based on the idealized behaviour of the flashing characteristics of fireflies. This paper presents an application of the FA to ED for different Test Case system. ED is applied and compared its solution quality and computation efficiency to Simulated Annealing (SA), Genetic algorithm (GA), Differential Evolution (DE), Particle swarm optimization (PSO), Artificial Bee Colony optimization (ABC), and Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO) optimization techniques. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms previous optimization methods.