A newly improved particle swarm optimization for economic dispatch with valve point loading effects

This paper proposes a newly improved particle swarm optimization (NIPSO) for solving economic dispatch problem with valve point loading effects. The proposed NIPSO is based on the particle swarm optimization with time-varying acceleration coefficients (PSO-TVAC) with more improvements including the use of sigmoid function with random variation for inertia weight factor, pseudo-gradient for guidance of particles, and quadratic programming for obtaining initial condition. With the new improvements, the search ability of the NIPSO method has been considerably enhanced in comparison with the PSO-TVAC method. The proposed NIPSO has been tested on 13-unit and 40-unit systems and the obtained best total costs are compared to those from many other methods available in the literature. The result comparison has shown that the proposed method can find better optimal solution than the many others. Therefore, the proposed NISPO could be favorable for solving the noncon-vex economic dispatch problems.