A New Efficient Hybrid Approach for Economic Dispatch with Valve Point Loading Effect

Economic dispatch (ED) is an important optimization task in power system operation for allocating generation among the committed units. This paper presents a novel optimization technique to determine the feasible optimal solution of the economic dispatch problem considering valve-point effect. The proposed PSODE-SA method combines the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and Differential Evolution (DE) with Simulated Annealing (SA) technique to optimize the performance of ED problems. The combined methodology and its variants are validated for a test system consisting of 40 thermal units whose fuel cost function takes into account the valve-point loading effects. Thus the proposed method is one of the state-of-the-art algorithms in solving load dispatch problems with the valve-point effect.