Improved parallel PSO solution to economic dispatch with practical generator constraints

This paper presents an improved parallel particle swarm optimization approach (IPPSO) based decomposed network for economic power dispatch with consideration of practical generator constraints. The range of partial power demand corresponding to the partial output powers near the global optimal solution is determined by a flexible decomposed network strategy and then the final optimal solution is obtained by parallel particle swarm optimization. To validate the robustness of the proposed IPPSO approach, it is tested to two test systems having nonconvex solution spaces, 26-bus (6 generating units) with consideration of valve point effects, network and with 15 generating units. The simulation results compared with recent global optimization methods (GA, MTS, SA, PSO and ICA-PSO). The outcome of the comparisons shows the effectiveness of the proposed IPPSO approach in terms of solution quality, consistency and reduced computational time compared to various methods available in the literature survey.