Application of shuffled frog leaping algorithm for economic dispatch with multiple fuel options

Economic dispatch with multiple fuel options is one of the important optimization problems in a power system. The cost curve of a thermal unit with multiple fuel options is highly nonlinear, containing discontinuities, and it is more realistically denoted as a segmented piecewise quadratic function. In this paper, a recent evolutionary algorithm called the shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) is applied for the solution of economic dispatch problem with multiple fuel options. The decision vector of SFLA consists of a sequence of integer numbers which represents the fuel options of generating units. In the proposed approach, SFLA is used to identify the optimal combinations of fuel options for the committed generating units and fitness of each decision vector in the population of SFLA is evaluated through the non-iterative lagrangian multiplier method. The combination of evolutionary algorithm with analytical approach proposed in this paper makes a quick decision to direct the search towards the optimal region. The proposed algorithm has been implemented to ten-unit economic dispatch problem with piecewise objective functions. The simulation results of the proposed algorithm are compared with the results of various methods reported in the literature. The comparison of results shows that the proposed SFLA algorithm provides quality solutions with lesser computation time.