Estimation of distribution and differential evolution cooperation for large scale economic load dispatch optimization of power systems

Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) is an important and difficult optimization problem in power system planning. This article aims at addressing two practically important issues related to ELD optimization: (1) analyzing the ELD problem from the perspective of evolutionary optimization; (2) developing effective algorithms for ELD problems of large scale. The first issue is addressed by investigating the fitness landscape of ELD problems with the purpose of estimating the expected performance of different approaches. To address the second issue, a new algorithm named “Estimation of Distribution and Differential Evolution Cooperation” (ED-DE) is proposed, which is a serial hybrid of two effective evolutionary computation (EC) techniques: estimation of distribution and differential evolution. The advantages of ED-DE over the previous ELD optimization algorithms are experimentally testified on ELD problems with the number of generators scaling from 10 to 160. The best solution records of classical 13 and 40-generator ELD problems with valve points, and the best solution records of 10, 20, 40, 80 and 160-generator ELD problems with both valve points and multiple fuels are updated in this work. To further evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of ED-DE, we also compare it with other state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms (EAs) on typical function optimization tasks.