An efficient Particle Swarm Optimization for Economic Dispatch with valve-point effect

This paper presents a new efficient approach to economic dispatch (ED) problems with smooth and non smooth cost functions using a particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique. The practical ED problems have nonsmooth cost functions with equality and inequality constraints that make the problem of finding the global optimum difficult using any mathematical approaches. In this paper a modified random search technique is employed so that fastest convergence is obtained for the same results published in IEEE Proceedings so far. To show its efficiency and effectiveness, the proposed EPSO is applied to test ED problems, one with smooth cost functions and others with nonsmooth cost functions considering valve-point loading effects. The experimental results show that the proposed EPSO method was indeed capable of obtaining higher quality solutions efficiently in ED problems.