A new approach to economic load dispatch based on improved evolutionary programming

This paper suggests an improved evolutionary programming to solve economic load dispatch problems with non-smooth fuel cost functions. Evolutionary programming (EP), unlike mathematics-based methods, has the capability of adapting to nonlinearities and discontinuities found in power systems and can offer a tool for optimal operation of power systems. Until now, evolutionary programming based approaches have not focused on the strategies that cart deal with infeasible solutions. The proposed approach combines EP with traditional mathematical techniques to consider linear equality constraints and nonlinear inequality constraints and evolve population rapidly by introducing quadratic fit-line search technique. An improved EP algorithm has been tested in ELD problems with non-smooth fuel cost functions. Simulation results have shown the superiority of the proposed method to the conventional algorithms.