A differential artificial bee colony algorithm is proposed for economic load dispatch problems of power systems.
Inspired by the differential evolution algorithm, the search behaviors of employed bees are improved by using the differential operators, which enhances the exploration ability and accelerates the converge speed of the algorithm. Moreover, an effective repair procedure is proposed to guarantee the feasibility of the new individuals. Experiments are carried out on some typical problems with valve-point effects and multiple fuels. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.