A Granular Computing Method for Economic Dispatch Problems With Valve-Point Effects

This paper presents a granular computing method (GrC) for the economic dispatch (ED) problems with valve-point effects to reduce the computational dimension and improve the solving accuracy. The computing process of the GrC is composed of the coarse granular computing and the fine granular computing which are connected with the load demand and optimized with the intelligent algorithm. For the purpose of improving the computational accuracy, a new granularity partition strategy is introduced in this work to cluster generating units into several fine granules based on their own peculiarities. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the GrC method, it is tested on 13- and 40-unit test systems with the valve-point effects and transmission losses considered. The obtained simulation results show that the proposed GrC method has significant superiority in accuracy and robustness compared with other previous optimization algorithms, which can be a potential method for solving the ED problems with valve-point effects.