A Multi-Operator Imperialist Competitive Algorithm for Solving Non-Convex Economic Dispatch Problem

Non-Convex Economic Dispatch (NED) has been addressed as an open and demanding optimization problem in power systems. Due to the fact that realistic ED problems have non-convex cost functions with equality and inequality constraints, conventional search methods are unable to effectively find the global solution. In recent years, because of their great potential to achieve optimal or close-to-optimal solution, meta-heuristic optimization techniques have attracted significant attention to tackle the complexity of NED problems. In this paper, an efficient approach is proposed based on Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA). The proposed algorithm named multi-operator ICA (MuICA) merges the advantages of Repulsion factor, Chaos and Mutation factor operators to the original ICA to maintain the diversity and avoid premature convergence. In order to study the usefulness of the proposed algorithm, its performance is compared with those of the other methods on different test systems. Simulation results confirm the superior performance of MuICA in solving NED problems with different number of thermal units.