Application of an improved Particle Swarm Optimization to economic load dispatch in power plant

In the application of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for the problem of economic load dispatch (ELD) in power plant There are some problems such as premature convergence of PSO, how to deal with constraints of the problem are need to be addressed. An improved PSO with the constraints partially solved combined with penalty function were introduced in this paper, the improved PSO refined in constraints management, swarm initialization method of PSO with respect to the features of ELD in power plant. Based on above improvements, the improved PSO solved the problem of premature convergence in PSO. In the application to a three and a five units power plant respectively, the simulation results shows that the optimization success rate can reach 100% with the improved PSO, which has the advantage of few parameters to adjust, easy to implement, with high computational efficiency and high accuracy.