Implementation of imperialist competitive algorithm to solve non-convex economic dispatch problem

This paper presents the application of an evolutionary algorithm, namely the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) to solve the economic dispatch (ED) problem. ICA is a population-based optimization algorithm inspired by the socio-political process of imperialistic competition and has proven its superior capabilities, such as faster convergence and better global minimum achievement. Practical ED has non-smooth cost functions subject to various equality and inequality constraints that make the ED problem a nonlinear and non-convex optimization problem. To show the efficiency of the ICA in solving the ED problem, it is applied to three test systems having non-convex solution spaces. Simulation studies verify the power and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.