Water Cycle Algorithm for Small Scale Electrical Economic Power Dispatch Problem

Abstract

Efficient and optimal planning of economic electrical power dispatch problem is an integral part of economic electrical energy generation planning and it is the need of time for the electrical engineers to browse this area in multi-scale planning scenarios. Intelligent and Optimization techniques based on evolutionary computing, metaheuristic,biological base,nature inspired, search method establish their applications in the area of electrical economic power dispatch planning(EEPDP) to reach global optimal solution for this multi scale, multi-decision, multi-objective combinatorial problem subjected to different constraints. In this paper, water cycle algorithm (WCA) has been proposed to solve electrical economic power dispatch problem for three and six unit system.This is based on how the streams and rivers flow downhill towards the sea and recycle in nature The suggested technique is tested on small scale system of three and six unit system of EEPDP considering various equality and inequality constraints . Test results are compared with other techniques grey wolf optimization(GWO),cuckoo search(CS),artificial bee colony(ABC),firefly algorithm(FA),particle swarm optimization(PSO),shuffled frog leap (SFL) ,bacteria foraging algorithm(BFO),harmony search(HS) applied in literature.Convergence of solution with iteration is presented for both cases.Simulation results proved that the WCA technique is better as compared to other nature inspired,heuristic,metaheuristic techniques to find global minima and maintain the solution quality in terms of low fuel cost.