Economic load dispatch using evolutionary algorithms

This paper presents evolutionary algorithms to solve the problems of economic load dispatch (ELD) with quadratic cost functions and piecewise quadratic cost functions. Genetic algorithms (GAs), evolutionary programming (EP) and evolution strategies (ESs) are applied to the ELD problems. To improve these methods in nonlinear optimization problems, two hybrid optimization methods exploiting the advantages of each of evolutionary algorithms are developed. Optimization methods, combining GA with ES and EP with ES, are tested in the ELD problem with piecewise quadratic cost functions. Case studies illustrate the superiority of the proposed methods to existing numerical methods.