In restructured electricity markets, the consumers have various procurement strategies to supply their electricity demand from alternative resources such as self-generating facility, bilateral contracts and pool market purchase. A hybrid approach based on binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) and binary imperialist competitive algorithm (BICA) is proposed in this paper to find optimal procurement for large consumers with multiple procurement options. The solution of these problems provides adequate information to obtain an electricity procurement problem for large consumers. Also, the results are compared with ICA and PSO methods. Test results show that the proposed hybrid approach is more effective and has higher capability in finding the optimum solutions in comparison with ICA and PSO methods. A case study is used to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed hybrid approach.
