Modified particle swarm optimization with time varying acceleration coefficients for economic load dispatch with generator constraints

This paper proposes a Modified Particle Swarm Optimization with Time Varying Acceleration Coefficients (MPSO-TVAC) for solving economic load dispatch (ELD) problem. Due to prohibited operating zones (POZ) and ramp rate limits of the practical generators, the ELD problems become nonlinear and nonconvex optimization problem. Furthermore, the ELD problem may be more complicated if transmission losses are considered. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is one of the famous heuristic methods for solving nonconvex problems. However, this method may suffer to trap at local minima especially for multimodal problem. To improve the solution quality and robustness of PSO algorithm, a new best neighbour particle called 'rbest' is proposed. The rbest provides extra information for each particle that is randomly selected from other best particles in order to diversify the movement of particle and avoid premature convergence. The effectiveness of MPSO-TVAC algorithm is tested on different power systems with POZ, ramp-rate limits and transmission loss constraints. To validate the performances of the proposed algorithm, comparative studies have been carried out in terms of convergence characteristic, solution quality, computation time and robustness. Simulation results found that the proposed MPSO-TVAC algorithm has good solution quality and more robust than other methods reported in previous work.