Performance evaluation of opposition based Differential Evolution on non-convex economic dispatch

Differential Evolution (DE) is a very simple but powerful stochastic global optimizer. Since its inception, it has proved to be a very efficient and robust technique for function optimization and has been used to solve problems in many scientific and engineering fields. The robustness of DE has drawn the attention of many researchers all over the world resulting in a lot of variants of the basic algorithm with improved performance. This paper presents the performance evaluation of four DE variants on non-convex Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) problem. It discusses the various adaptations made on a classical DE algorithm to improve exploration and exploitation of a search space. ELD is a powerful tool in power system optimization problems. The problem becomes complex due to the presence of throttle losses in a multi valve steam generating unit. Throttle losses cause valve point loading effect which makes non convex cost characteristics. Three different test cases are studied and implemented using different DE variants and their performance with varying dimensionality is studied.