A modified differential evolution approach for dynamic economic dispatch with valve-point effects

Dynamic economic dispatch (DED) plays an important role in power system operation, which is a complicated non-linear constrained optimization problem. It has nonsmooth and nonconvex characteristic when generation unit valve-point effects are taken into account. This paper proposes a modified differential evolution approach (MDE) to solve DED problem with valve-point effects. In the proposed MDE method, feasibility-based selection comparison techniques and heuristic search rules are devised to handle constraints effectively. In contrast to the penalty function method, the constraints-handling method does not require penalty factors or any extra parameters and can guide the population to the feasible region quickly. Especially, it can be satisfied equality constraints of DED problem precisely. Moreover, the effects of two crucial parameters on the performance of the MDE for DED problem are studied as well. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated for application example and the test results are compared with those of other methods reported in literature. It is shown that the proposed method is capable of yielding higher quality solutions.