Artificial Immune-Based Optimization Technique for Solving Economic Dispatch in Power System

This paper presents an Artificial Immune-based optimization technique for solving the economic dispatch problem in a power system. The main role of electrical power utility is to ensure that electrical energy requirement from the customer is served. However in doing so, the power utility has also to ensure that the electrical power is generated with minimum cost. Hence, for economic operation of the system, the total demand must be appropriately shared among the generating units with an objective to minimize the total generation cost for the system. Economic Dispatch is a procedure to determine the electrical power to be generated by the committed generating units in a power system so that the total generation cost of the system is minimized, while satisfying the load demand simultaneously. The proposed technique implemented Clonal Selection algorithm with several cloning, mutation and selection approaches. These approaches were tested and compared in order to determine the best strategy for solving the economic dispatch problem. The feasibility of the proposed techniques was demonstrated on a system with 18 generating units at various loading conditions. The results show that Artificial Immune System optimization technique that employed adaptive cloning, selective mutation and pair-wise tournament selection has provided the best result in terms of cost minimization and least execution time. A comparative study with λ-iteration optimization method and Genetic Algorithm was also presented.