Solving an economic and environmental dispatch problem using evolutionary algorithm

For successful operation of any power system, an effective scheduling of power generation is crucial. In this paper, we consider a power system with two types of generators, thermal and hydro. The characteristics of these generators vary with respect to the cost, emission to the environment, input source, capacity limit, and technological constraints. The mathematical model considering two objectives, such as minimization of the operating cost and minimization of total emissions, for a hydrothermal system is discussed. A solution approach has been proposed, based on evolutionary computation concept, for solving a benchmark problem for both single and bi-objective version of the problem. In the approach, an initial population of solutions is generated based on a heuristic and the population is then evolved using two well-known evolutionary search algorithms. The solutions of our approaches are compared with another approach from the literature. The analysis of the results reveals that the heuristic enhanced the performance of the evolutionary algorithms considered in this paper.