Evolutionary programming‐based economic dispatch for units with multiple fuel options

This paper presents the application of evolutionary programming (EP) to economic dispatch of generators having piecewise quadratic cost functions. The proposed EP algorithm always determines the global or near global optimum without any restrictions on the shape of the cost functions. The method is applied to an example system with piecewise cost functions and the results are compared with those of the recent adaptive Hopfield neural network method. The test results prove that the EP method is simpler and more efficient for solving economic dispatch (ED) problems with multiple cost curves than many existing techniques.