The ant colony optimisation solving continuous problems

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.