An Efficient Particle Swarm Optimization for Economic Dispatch Problems With Non-smooth cost functions

An efficient Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique, employed to solve Economic Dispatch (ED) problems in power system is presented in this paper. With practical consideration, ED will have nonsmooth cost functions with equality and inequality constraints that makes the problem, a large-scale highly constrained nonlinear optimization problem.The proposed method expands the original PSO to handle a different approach for solving those constraints. In this paper, an efficient PSO technique is employed so that faster convergence is obtained for the same results published in IEEE Proceedings. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method it is being applied to test ED problems, one with smooth and other with nonsmooth cost functions considering valve-point loading effects. Comparison with other optimization techniques showed the superiority of the proposed EPSO approach and confirmed its potential for solving nonlinear economic load dispatch problems. Key-words: Economic load dispatch, Particle swarm optimization, Valve point loading effect