A new sequential VB-VB approach for economic dispatch of thermal generation units with convex/non-convex cost characteristics

Economic dispatch (ED) is the generation allocation problem subject to various constraints. The actual behaviour of thermal generators is non-convex but cost characteristics are typically approximated to convex ones in the analysis. So the results obtained through optimization techniques can be inaccurate. Dynamic programming has been used to solve non-convex ED, but it suffers from the curse of dimensionality. The non-convex ED problem is generally solved by using artificial intelligence (AI) tools and hybrid approaches. Among them, the Virtual Bees (VB) algorithm has been used for the solution of complex optimization problems. This paper presents a New Sequential VB-VB algorithm to solve convex as well nonconvex ED. Standard IEEE test systems have been tested with convex and non-convex ED problems for the validation of this approach. The numerical results obtained indicate the validity of the proposed algorithm in comparison with other state of the art techniques.