An Improved Differential Evolution Based Dynamic Economic Dispatch with Nonsmooth Fuel Cost Function

Dynamic economic dispatch (DED) is one of the major operational decisions in electric power systems. DED problem is an optimization problem with an objective to determine the optimal combination of power outputs for all generating units over a certain period of time in order to minimize the total fuel cost while satisfying dynamic operational constraints and load demand in each interval. This paper presents an improved differential evolution (IDE) method to solve the DED problem of generating units considering valve-point effects. Heuristic crossover technique and gene swap operator are introduced in the proposed approach to improve the convergence characteristic of the differential evolution (DE) algorithm. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, two test systems consisting of five and ten generating units have been considered. The results obtained through the proposed method are compared with those reported in the literature.