Development of an Educational Simulator for Particle Swarm Optimization and Economic Dispatch Applications

This paper presents a windows-based educational simulator with user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for the education and training of particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique for mathematical optimization problems and economic dispatch (ED) applications. The main objective for developing the simulator is to provide information with the electrical engineering undergraduate students that the up-to-date artificial intelligent (AI) techniques including PSO are actively used in power system optimization problems. The simulator can be used as a lecturing tool to stimulate an interest in the power system engineering of the undergraduate students. The students can be more familiar with the optimization problems including power system ED problem through the iterative uses of the simulator. Also, they can increase understandings on PSO mechanism by the homework on the optimal design of several control parameters such as inertia weight, acceleration coefficients, and the number of population, etc. In the developed simulator, instructors and students can select the optimization functions and set the parameters that have an influence on PSO performance. The simulator is applied not only to mathematical optimization functions but also to economic dispatch (ED) problems with non-smooth cost functions, which is designed so that users can solve other mathematical functions through simple additional MATLAB coding.