Normal Boundary Intersection based multi-objective Harmony Search algorithm for environmental Economic Load Dispatch problem

The growing concern over the increasing cost of fossil fuels and the adverse effects of gaseous emissions from power plants call for operating the power plants in a more economical and environment-friendly way. This paper presents a multi-objective model for the environmental economic dispatch (EED) problem with two conflicting objectives: fuel cost and gaseous emission. To model the problem accurately a nonlinear cost function has been considered with valve point loading effect and power transmission line losses. EED is thus a constrained non-linear multi-objective optimization problem. For solving this, a novel numerical optimization method has been proposed in this paper. Normal boundary intersection approach has been used to decompose the problem into several single-objective subproblems which are then solved using the Harmony Search algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated on three test systems and the results obtained have been compared to those of several other methods to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed algorithm.