Economic load dispatch: A new hybrid particle swarm optimization approach

Economic load dispatch, that optimizes the operation cost with respect to the load demands of customers, is one of the most important problems in power systems. A new hybrid particle swarm optimization (PSO) that incorporates a wavelet theory based mutation operation for solving economic load dispatch is proposed. It applies a wavelet theory to enhance PSO in exploring solution spaces more effectively for better solutions. Simulation results of the economic load dispatch show empirically that the proposed method outperforms significantly the existing methods in terms of solution quality and solution stability.