A Particle Swarm Optimization for Economic Dispatch With Nonsmooth Cost Functions

This work presents a new approach to economic dispatch (ED) problems with nonsmooth cost functions using a particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique. The practical ED problems have nonsmooth cost functions with equality and inequality constraints that make the problem of finding the global optimum difficult using any mathematical approaches. A modified PSO (MPSO) mechanism is suggested to deal with the equality and inequality constraints in the ED problems. A constraint treatment mechanism is devised in such a way that the dynamic process inherent in the conventional PSO is preserved. Moreover, a dynamic search-space reduction strategy is devised to accelerate the optimization process. To show its efficiency…