Economic Dispatch of 500 kV Java-Bali Power System using Hybrid Particle Swarm-Ant Colony Optimization Method

The rapid growth of population and economic development of a country requires an adequate support of electrical power supply management. The interconnected system of generation plants with appropriate economic dispatch is purposed to achieve certain goal. This paper describes the use of a hybrid method between the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) method to be implemented for economic dispatch of the 500kV Java-Bali power system. It aims to divide the generation loading among the whole thermal power plants in the system and to look for the best combination which gives the most economical generation cost. The search for solutions using this hybrid method is determined by the Gbest's particle distribution and the ability of ants to find the best solution, which is called BestAnt. In this study, the evaluation process was carried out using 60 iterations for the 30-bus network and the 500kV Java-Bali power network based on the available data. The optimization results show that the generation cost being optimized using the hybrid method is lower than when using the PSO method, even if it is still higher than when using the ACO method. However, the hybrid method offers the best achievement in terms of computation speed being compared to both the PSO and ACO methods.