Swarm intelligence for hybrid cost dispatch problem

The paper presents a modified particle swarm optimizer (PSO) to solve the economic power dispatch problem with piecewise quadratic cost function. Practically, operating conditions of many generating units require that the cost function be segmented as piecewise quadratic functions instead of using one convex function for each generator. The proposed technique is applied to a case study of multiple intersecting cost functions for each unit. Unlike the hierarchical method, the proposed algorithm finds combination of power generation that minimizes the total cost function while exactly satisfying the total demand.