Hybrid imperialist competitive-sequential quadratic programming (HIC-SQP) algorithm for solving economic load dispatch with incorporating stochastic wind power: A comparative study on heuristic optimization techniques

• The paper has solved economic load dispatch problem.
• Stochastic wind generation has been considered.
• A HIC-SQP method has been implemented for optimization solution.
• HIC-SQP has been tested on systems possessing 6, 13, 15, and 40 generating units.
• HIC-SQP method has better performance in comparison with other methods.

The paper presents a new method based on a hybrid algorithm consisting of imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and sequential quadratic programming (SQP) technique to solve the power system economic load dispatch (ELD) problem. ICA could be taken into account as a powerful technique. Nevertheless, it may be trapped in local optima especially when numbers of imperialists increase. To alleviate this drawback, SQP is used to fine-tune the results of ICA to increase confidence in the solution. Renewable sources and wind energy especially have recently been getting more interest because of various environmental and economical considerations. So, wind power is included in the problem formulation. The incomplete gamma function (IGF) is used to characterize the impact of wind power. The hybrid imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and sequential quadratic programming (SQP) technique (HIC-SQP) is applied to solve economic load dispatch with incorporating stochastic wind power. To evaluate its effectiveness, the proposed method is tested on various power systems with 6, 13, 15, and 40 power plants with and without wind power. Simulation results of proposed method are compared with state-of-the-art heuristic optimization methods. It can be clearly seen that the proposed method improves the solution of ELD problem.