Economic Dispatch Using Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization with Prohibited Operating Zones and Ramp Rate Limit Constraints

Abstract

This paper proposes a new Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (HPSO) method that integrates the Evolutionary Programming (EP) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) techniques. The proposed method is applied to solve Economic Dispatch(ED) problems considering prohibited operating zones, ramp rate limits, capacity limits and power balance constraints. In the proposed HPSO method, the best features of both EP and PSO are exploited, and it is capable of finding the most optimal solution for the non-linear optimization problems. For validating the proposed method, it has been tested on the standard three, six, fifteen and twenty unit test systems. The numerical results show that the proposed HPSO method is well suitable for solving non-linear economic dispatch problems, and it outperforms the EP, PSO and other modern metaheuristic optimization methods reported in the recent literatures.