Hooke-Jeeves' Method Applied to a New Economic Dispatch Problem Formulation

The Economic Dispatch Problem (EDP) is one of the important optimization problem in a power system. Traditionally, in EDP, the cost function for each generator has been approximately represented by a single quadratic function. The main aim of EDP is to minimize the total cost of generating real power while satisfying the equality constraints of power balance and the inequality generator capacity constraints. In this paper a New Economic Dispatch Problem Formulation (NEDPF) has been proposed to solve EDP. This new formulation is based on the reduction of the number of variables (number of generators) and elimination of the equality and inequality constraints, thus the transformation of the constrained non linear programming problem to an unconstrained one. The new unconstrained objective function, is minimized by Hooke-Jeeves’ method. The NEDPF was tested for different cases (2, 3 and 6 generator units) and the results are judged satisfactory.