Multiple tabu search algorithm for economic dispatch problem considering valve-point effects

This paper presents a multiple tabu search (MTS) algorithm to solve the economic dispatch (ED) problem by taking valve-point effects into consideration. The practical ED problem with valve-point effects is represented as a non-smooth optimization problem with equality and inequality constraints that make the problem of finding the global or near global optimum difficult. The proposed MTS algorithm is the sequential execution of individual tabu search (TS) algorithm simultaneously by only one personal microcomputer. The MTS algorithm introduces additional techniques for improvement of search process, such as initialization, adaptive searches, multiple searches, replacing and restarting process. To show its effectiveness, the MTS is applied to test two studied systems consisting of 13 and 40 power generating units with valve-point effects. The optimized results by MTS are compared with those of conventional approaches, such as simulated annealing (SA), genetic algorithm (GA), TS algorithm and particle swarm optimization (PSO). Studied results confirm that the proposed MTS approach is capable of obtaining higher quality solution efficiently and lowest computational time.