Secant method combined with PSO for Economic Dispatch with prohibited operating zones

This paper describes secant method combined with particle swarm optimization for solving economic dispatch (ED) problem with prohibited operating zones. Two stages are involved in the proposed approach to solve the ED problem with prohibited operating zones. First, the range of output powers near to the global optimal solution is determined by secant method without considering prohibited zones and then the evaluation of the final optimal solution is done by particle swarm optimization. The proposed algorithm has been tested on a power system having 4, 15 and 40 units with prohibited zones. Simulation results of the proposed approach were compared in terms of solution quality, convergence characteristics and computation efficiency with existing algorithms. From the different case studies, it is observed that the proposed approach provides qualitative solution with less computational time compared to various methods available in the literature survey.