Solving nonconvex economic load dispatch problem using particle swarm optimization with time varying acceleration coefficients

This article presents the design and application of an efficient hybrid heuristic search method to solve the practical economic dispatch problem considering many nonlinear characteristics of power generators, and their operational constraints, such as transmission losses, valve‐point effects, multi‐fuel options, prohibited operating zones, ramp rate limits and spinning reserve. These practical operation constraints which can usually be found at the same time in realistic power system operations make the economic load dispatch (ELD) problem a nonsmooth optimization problem having complex and nonconvex features with heavy equality and inequality constraints. A particle swarm optimization with time varying acceleration coefficients is proposed to determine optimal ELD problem in this paper. The proposed methodology easily takes care of solving nonconvex ELD problems along with different constraints like transmission losses, dynamic operation constraints, and prohibited operating zones. The proposed approach has been implemented on the 3‐machines 6‐bus, IEEE 5‐machines 14‐bus, IEEE 6‐machines 30‐bus systems and 13 thermal units power system. The proposed technique is compared with solve the ELD problem with hybrid approach by using the valve‐point effect. The comparison results prove the capability of the proposed method give significant improvements in the generation cost for the ELD problem. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 299–308, 2016