A modified particle swarm optimizer applied to the solution of the economic dispatch problem

In this paper, a modified approach, based on the particle swarm optimizer (PSO) is presented and explained in detail. As a case study, this PSO technique is applied to the solution of the economic dispatch (ED) problem of thermal generating units. A piecewise quadratic function is used to represent the fuel cost of each generating unit. The B-coefficient method is used to model the transmission losses. A modification to the standard PSO algorithm is proposed to allow dealing with the power balance equality constraint. Unlike the traditional methods, this modification does not depend on penalizing the infeasible solutions using a pre-defined penalty function. The application of the proposed method to several case studies shows that it is applicable to large networks with multigenerating units including transmission losses with very promising results.