A Modified Particle Swarm Optimization for Economic Dispatch with Nonsmooth Cost Functions

This paper 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, which makes the problem of finding the global optimum difficult when using any mathematical approaches. In this paper, a modified PSO (MPSO) mechanism is suggested to deal with the equality and inequality constraints in the ED problems. To validate the results obtained by MPSO, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is applied for comparison. Also, the results obtained by MPSO and PSO are compared with the previous approaches reported in the literature. The results show that the MPSO produces optimal or nearly optimal solutions for the study systems.