Fast initialization of population based methods for solving economic dispatch problems

This paper proposes a new technique to efficiently initialize the population based optimization methods for solving economic dispatch (ED) problems. Constraints of ED problems are handled by different mechanisms such as penalized objective function or generating feasible solution in search domain. This paper deals with the second approach of constraint handling and presents a technique to speed up the procedure of generating feasible set of solutions. An operating factor is also defined and the boundary modification has been proposed to narrow the search space. Two case studies with 6 and 40 generating units have been used to apply the proposed methods. The simulation results showed that the proposed methods shorten the computation time when the optimization method is initialized.