A Novel Social Spider Optimization Algorithm for Large-Scale Economic Load Dispatch Problem

The paper develops an improved social spider optimization algorithm (ISSO) for finding optimal solutions of economic load dispatch (ELD) problems. Different ELD problem study cases can bring huge challenges for testing the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed ISSO method since discontinuous objective functions as well as complicated constraints are taken into account. The improved method is different from original social spider optimization algorithm (SSSO) by performing several modifications directly related to three processes of new solution generation. Namely, the proposed method keeps one formula for the first and the second generations and modify them effectively while SSSO has two different formulas for each generation. In the third generation, the proposed method applies a new formula for determining the mating radius of dominant males and females with the intent to expand search space and avoid falling into local zones. The modifications can support the proposed ISSO method find better solutions with faster manner than SSSO while the number of control parameters and the number of computational processes can be reduced. As a result, the proposed method can find much less generation cost and achieve faster search speeds than SSSO for all considered systems. On the other hand, the search ability evaluation of the proposed method is also given by comparing results with other existing methods available in previous studies. The proposed method can obtain approximate or better results and faster convergence than nearly all compared methods excluding for the last system. Consequently, the proposed ISSO method can be recommended to be a strong method for ELD problem and it can be tried for other mathematical problems in engineering.