Fuzzy mutated evolutionary programming based algorithm for combined economic and emission dispatch

The Economic Dispatch problem in a power system is to determine the optimal combination of power outputs for all generating units which will minimize the total fuel cost while satisfying all practical constraints. Now a day with increasing awareness of environmental pollution caused by burning of fossil fuels, emission of pollutants is also a criterion for economic dispatch of the plants. The environmental objective of generation dispatch is to minimize the total environmental cost or the total pollutant emission. Fuzzy logic has been applied in combination with Evolutionary Programming (EP) to solve various power system problems. For smooth and better convergence in EP the mutation process is improved by fuzzy logic strategy leading to an improved EP technique termed as Fuzzy Mutated Evolutionary Programming (FMEP). This paper presents an efficient and simple approach for solving the emission constrained economic dispatch problem using FMEP. The convergence and usefulness of the proposed FMEP is demonstrated through its application to a test system. The computational results reveal that the proposed algorithm has excellent convergence characteristics and is superior to the existing methods.