Solution to economic load dispatch using PSO

Abstract

The modern power system around the world has grown in complexity of interconnection and power demand. The focus has shifted towards enhanced performance, increased customer focus, low cost, reliable and clean power. In this changed perspective, scarcity of energy resources, increasing power generation cost, environmental concern necessitates optimal economic dispatch. In reality power stations neither are at equal distances from load nor have similar fuel cost functions. Hence for providing cheaper power, load has to be distributed among various power stations in a way which results in lowest cost for generation. Practical economic dispatch (ED) problems have highly non-linear objective function with rigid equality and inequality constraints. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is applied to allot the active power among the generating stations satisfying the system constraints and minimizing the cost of power generated. The viability of the method is analyzed for its accuracy and rate of convergence. The economic load dispatch problem is solved for three and six unit system using PSO and conventional method for both cases of neglecting and including transmission losses. The results of PSO method were compared with conventional method and were found to be superior. The conventional optimization methods are unable to solve such problems due to local optimum solution convergence. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) since its initiation in the last 15 years has been a potential solution to the practical constrained economic load dispatch (ELD) problem. The optimization technique is constantly evolving to provide better and faster results.