Tournament-based harmony search algorithm for non-convex economic load dispatch problem

• The tournament-based harmony search (THS) algorithm is proposed for economic load dispatch (ELD) problem.
• In THS, the random selection in the memory consideration is replaced by the tournament selection to observe the natural selection strategy.
• The proposed THS is tested using three different tournament size values for four test ELD systems.
• The results suggest that the THS with higher tournament size is efficient for ELD.
• New results appeared using THS for ELD when THS was compared with 43 methods published in 33 articles.

This paper proposes a tournament-based harmony search (THS) algorithm for economic load dispatch (ELD) problem. The THS is an efficient modified version of the harmony search (HS) algorithm where the random selection process in the memory consideration operator is replaced by the tournament selection process to activate the natural selection of the survival-of-the-fittest principle and thus improve the convergence properties of HS. The performance THS is evaluated with ELD problem using five different test systems: 3-units generator system; two versions of 13-units generator system; 40-units generator system; and large-scaled 80-units generator system. The effect of tournament size (t) on the performance of THS is studied. A comparative evaluation between THS and other existing methods reported in the literature are carried out. The simulation results show that the THS algorithm is capable of achieving better quality solutions than many of the well-popular optimization methods.

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