Comparision of two soft computing techniques for economic dispatch with piece wise quadratic cost function

This paper presents two modern approaches for solving economic dispatch (ED) problem considering piece wise quadratic cost function. Practical Economic dispatch problems have non-smooth fuel cost function with equality and inequality constraints which make it difficult to be effectively solved. In this paper modern heuristic methods such as shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) and harmony search (HS) are proposed for solving ED problem. The proposed approaches don´t have the drawbacks of the classical heuristics such as local optimal trapping due to premature convergence, insufficient capability to find nearby extreme points, and lack of efficient mechanism to treat the constraints. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed methods were demonstrated on ten unit system with multiple fuel options. The experiments showed that the proposed approaches were capable of determining global solution.