Economic Power Dispatch of Power System with Pollution Control using Multiobjective Ant Colony Optimization

This paper presents solution of optimal power flow (OPF) problem of medium-sized power systems via an ant colony optimisation (ACO) metaheuristic method. The objective is to minimise the total fuel cost of generation and environmental pollution caused by fossil based thermal generating units and also maintain an acceptable system performance in terms of limits on generator real and reactive power outputs, bus voltages, shunt capacitors/reactors, transformers tap-setting and power flow of transmission lines. CPU times can be reduced by decomposing the optimisation constraints of the power system to active constraints manipulated directly by ACO, and passive constraints maintained in their soft limits using a conventional constraint load flow. Simulation results on the IEEE 30-bus network with 6 generators show that by this method, an optimum solution can be given quickly.