Abstract

Economic load dispatch (ELD) is one of the most important optimization problems in a power system. The objective of ED is that the sharing of power demand among the online generators keeping minimum cost of generation as a constraint. This paper mainly focuses on minimizing the total fuel cost of all generators of the Nigeria integrated power system. This paper proposes a hybrid algorithm Evolutionary Programming (EP) and Efficient Particle Swarm Optimization (EPSO) to solve non-convex economic dispatch problem. In order to exploit the promising solution region, a simple local random search EP procedure is integrated with EPSO to form the proposed hybrid algorithm. Each optimization method (GA, PSO, EPSO and EP-EPSO) was implemented on a personal computer with Core i5 intel 2.10 GHz processor and Matlab 10.2 platform. Simulation result show that optimization by EP-EPSO gave a total cost of 170.8845 N/hr as compared by 171.9445 N/hr by EPSO, 172.1228 N/hr for particle swarm optimization(PSO) and 172.5723 N/hr for genetic algorithm(GA). The results show that the proposed EP-EPSO has better optimal cost when compared to the other techniques. The ELD problem of the Nigerian power system has been solved successfully with EP-EPSO performing better than the other methods.