Solution of Economic Load Dispatch using real coded Hybrid Stochastic Search

This paper presents the design and application of a new real coded Hybrid Stochastic Search (HSS) heuristic to the Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) problem in power systems. The heuristic incorporates Simulated Annealing (SA) in the selection process of Genetic Algorithm (GA). The HSS heuristic has been designed with the genetic operator called the Blend crossover to provide a better search capability. The heuristic is quite general and various aspects like valve point discontinuities, non-monotonically increasing costs, emission control and transmission losses, etc. are easily incorporated as per requirement. Extensive testing has been carried out on standard test systems. The performance and the results obtained by this heuristic have been compared with those reported in the literature. These results indicate that the new HSS heuristic converges to better solutions much more rapidly than the other GA and SA heuristics and is, therefore, applicable to large real life power systems.