A New Modified Shuffle Frog Leaping Algorithm for Non-Smooth Economic Dispatch

This paper presents an effective evolutionary method for solve economic dispatch (ED) with units having prohibited operating zones. ED has been widely used in power system operation and planning for determination of electricity prices. ED problem is a non smooth problem when valve point effects of generation units are considered. With addition the valve point effect and prohibited zones in ED problem this problem complicates more and more respect before and is needed to solve with a strong and accuracy algorithm. This paper presents a very robust algorithm (SLFA) to solve ED problem with valve point effect, furthermore in an attempt to reduce processing time and improve the quality of solutions, particularly to avoid being trapped in local optima, this paper present a modified SLFA that called MSLFA algorithm to solve ED problem. The performance of the MSFLA has been tested on two typical systems consisting of 6 and 40 thermal units and compared with conventional approaches such as genetic algorithm (GA), tabu search algorithm (TSA), PSO and others in literatures. The comparison results show that the efficiency of proposed approach can reach higher quality solution and faster computational time than the conventional methods.